AN urgent question for every modern European state is how to take proper care of its pluralist character. Pluralities differ from state to state recent referendums have displayed beyond doubt the existence, and to some extent the character, of our own. But serious pluralities now exist everywhere and everywhere the temptation is to rely on a tradition - moral, religious, national, racial or, commonly, a mixture of these - to override the pluralist fact. The urgent question is how to discover rights within the pluralist fact. Attracta Ingram's discussion of the emergence of rights from the association of mutually autonomous persons provides a lens through which the problem can be more clearly seen.
Talk of "rights" has been common in Europe since the late 17th century - but rights may be imagined in many ways. Persons may be imagined as owning themselves, and so rights become property, much like houses or cars persons coming to political association are imagined as already equipped with rights. The counter image is of persons acquiring rights only within some particular society, and only those rights appropriate to that particular society. The first image is, roughly, libertarian; the second, equally roughly, communitarian. Attracta Ingram here proposes a third approach the political theory of rights" of her book's title.
Patently, "rights" or "entitlements" effectively exist in a particular jurisdiction only when established. It is also clear that claims are made to introduce other rights or to withdraw some that exist. Dr Ingram argues that rights emerge within and from political relationships, but insists that these relationships are between persons that cannot be defined exhaustively as, say, "citizens of Ireland". The source of rights, then, will be neither ownership of oneself nor simply membership of a particular community but, most fundamentally, the autonomy or self governing nature of the associating persons.
A human political association is in fact - although the fact may be only imperfectly realised - an association between autonomous persons. There will be rights in one jurisdiction that are not found in another, but citizens or subjects are never merely that, and from their mutual autonomy comes the possibility of reasonable construction and reform. What rights emerge within an association of mutually autonomous persons must, of course, be discovered and agreed they are not universally and unequivocally obvious. Hence the central and continuing necessity for political conversation, since mutual autonomy is secure only in a conversational politics. And since, in human conversation, discoveries are made piecemeal, the discovery and implementation of rights will be piecemeal.
In her detailed analyses, Dr Ingram elucidates some important rights associated with liberal democracies, and argues for a concept of the role of the state different from that of either libertarian or communitarian theories. Her work sustains a liberal democratic polity and may be thought culturally limited because of it. Dr Ingram's theory distinguishes associations as more or less valuable, but her claim is not that any particular modern liberal democratic state wholly embodies the ideal.
The theory of autonomy may emerge within one culture, but autonomy is trans cultural. Dr Ingram argues that the contemporary liberal tradition acknowledges a respect for persons, but she accepts that there may be other traditions with some equally good way of establishing this respect. However, the present political issue for European states, including our own, is how to discover entitlements within significantly pluralist liberal democracies. To this end, a politics of autonomy is worth considering and Attracta Ingram's account should be widely read. Some philosophy should not be left to philosophers.
