What’s Really Wrong with Rights?

As I sit writing this in the opulent Jefferson Hotel in downtown Richmond, attending the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Honors Program conference on rights and duties, a thought occurs to me.

The many accomplished academics and professors who have spoken this week on the impoverished state of modern rights philosophy and discourse—a topic I myself summarily broached recently at Ethika Politika—have each offered different perspectives on what’s wrong with rights.

My own takeaway from this wonderful week-long experience is a simple one. It’s impossible to trace the history of ideas in a strictly causal chain; observable correlation between ideas is the best we can hope to see.

That being said, Dr. Matt O’Brien put it best when asked where our modern rights problems truly began. Was it Locke? Ockham? Rawls? Andrew Jackson? The 1860s?

His answer is worth reflecting on, as it invites us to reconsider the true source of all modern complexities and impoverishments, be they on a cursory glance political, economic or social in nature.

“The garden of Eden.”