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History student and law graduate Hayden Thorne is worried that with the recent protests too much attention is being given to individual rights and more focus should be on the collective good. He opines:
In recent days, as vaccine mandates for healthcare workers and teachers have come into effect, there’s been plenty of talk about the so-called “rights” of the individual to refuse the vaccine and keep their job.
Leaving to one side the public health discussion, the nature of the dialogue occurring is a major concern.
The emergence of a strong individual rights dialogue in New Zealand appears to be relatively new, and derived from American conceptions of individualism and individual freedoms.
[…]Let’s start with the 1950s and 1960s. In the United States, individual rights and freedoms provided civil rights and civil liberties activists with a framework to challenge oppressive racial and social justice policies.
[…]Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People successfully adopted an individual rights framework because they had to – the American Constitution with its supreme Bill of Rights provided the most effective mechanism to uphold the rights of coloured and marginalised Americans.
We should never lose sight of the fact these actions were undertaken for the collective good.
In the 1970s, this individual rights dialogue was corrupted by the American right – in particular, the religious right – to protect what it saw as important, at the expense of other groups in society. Debates about abortion and gun control became infected with an emphasis on individual rights.
It is this post-1960s American conception of individual freedom that now seems to be dominating the anti-mandate and anti-vaccine protests. The belief in a rigid set of rights that cannot be taken away, even when they harm or infringe on the rights of others, corrupts the way individual freedom can be (and has been) a tool for positive change.
[…]Let us leave behind this American-centric, rights-driven debate. It misrepresents why individual rights and freedoms are historically important and misunderstands New Zealand’s constitutional structure.
New Zealand society, reflected in our own constitutional structure, involves a much stronger view of the collective – the rights of society as a whole and the conditions that come with being a part of society.
Replacing this with a focus on individualism is selfish, does great harm to the community, and shows a lack of respect for others. Instead of focusing on the rights of the individual, the focus should be on the collective, and the things that need to be done for the good of the community.
Hayden’s argument, in a nutshell, is that people shouldn’t be selfish and, much more importantly, the government has the right to compel people not to be selfish. Actually, to be fair, his argument is that you shouldn’t be unreasonably selfish and the government has the right to compel you not to be unreasonably selfish.
It’s also probably fair to say he thinks that Covid vaccination mandates are OK because in his opinion those that oppose are being unreasonably selfish to the point their selfishness is harmful to the collective good.
But who decides when someone is being so selfish that the government has the right to force that person to act against their will? The government of course!
Hayden also reckons that there are no absolute individual rights as all individual rights are subject to the collective good and subject to “reasonable limits”. But let’s take the most basic individual right of all, the right to life. If this is not an absolute individual right, what’s to stop a government from declaring someone an enemy of the State and killing that person? This of course isn’t just a hypothetical as it’s happened throughout history with tyrannical governments.
As a history student, Hayden should know that the fundamental reason for individual rights, particularly those that are absolute, is to protect the individual from tyranny, whether it be the tyranny of the majority or the tyranny of the government.
I could go on but instead here’s a quote from the Constitution of the USSR:
“No one has the right to use socialist property for personal gain or other selfish ends.”
Or, as Hayden would say, “No one has the right to refuse the Covid vaccine or oppose Covid mandates for personal reasons or other selfish ends.” Well, at least what Hayden would call “selfish ends.”
