george herbert mead on human rights

George Herbert Mead on Human RightsAuthor(s): Joseph BetzSource: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Fall, 1974), pp. 199-223Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40319716 .

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Joseph Betz

George Herbert Mead On Human Rights*

I. Introduction

Mead's theory of rights1 is expounded in terms of differences that make a difference. It is part of a theory of society and selfhood that' encourages and provides intellectual guidance for both social reform and psychological or psychiatric cure. It is a thoroughly democratic theory, and, in fact, argues that democracy and human rights are mutually implicatory and rise or fall together. It is a theory which both recognizes the well-established rights of the comfortably successful businessman and provides legitimacy for the new claims to rights of the dissatisfied blacks who picket his business, and helps each side respect the other. It is a theory which explains how even drastic changes in rights can be orderly and can be based on rights to request and realize changes which make revolution unnecessary. It shows how stability and advance are compossible. There is a place to stand in Mead's theory for both the spokesman for the establishment defending settled rights against the criminal, and for the principled civil disobedient demanding new rights for the disadvantaged against the establishment, rights even for those as disadvantaged as we render our convicted criminals.

In some senses of the word "natural," Mead argues that there are "natural rights." If "natural" means "fundamental" or inherent in selves, and "natural rights" are "contrasted with the unnatural rights which have been conferred upon privileged classes or individuals," and if a "natural right" is "a right that belongs to the nature of society and ... to ... the men who constitute that society" (SW, p. 161), then there are natural rights. Mead does not, however, allow the existence of the natural rights clear and dear to the classical British libertarians and to thinkers like Hobbes and Locke. To Mead, natural rights do not inhere in solitary individuals in a state of nature prior to a state of civil society. To Mead, natural rights are not given up when one enters society, nor are some insecure rights given up in order that others may



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be retained more securely, nor does some most fundamental right like that to property exist before society and government and provide a basis for their eventual origin through a social contract. Mead is mildly contractarian in his approach to rights, since he does hold that rights exist only if they are "acknowledged" (MT, p. 13), "recognized" (SW, p. 160), or agreed to, but he holds that there was no social contract in a Hobbesian or Lockean sense. Pragmatist that he is, Mead stresses that rights are eventual consequences which arise in a process rather than fixed antecedents, or unchanging natural structures. Since he argues that there are no complete human individuals prior to socialization, no substantial souls with divinely-determined faculties of reason, he denies the sort of rights which would inhere in these mythical beings. What there are, Mead believes, are social selves, selves which arise or emerge in the human social process, each of which is a reflection of that process from a particular perspective and which derives his or her rationality from that process. The sort of rights Mead allows and explicates inhere in such social selves.

Mead remarks that the term "natural" has always been understood with "either a backward or a forward look" (SW, p. 161). Nature has been conceived of either as that initial condition of things discoverable in a careful investigation of the past or as that mature condition which manifests itself as growth is completed and towards which things grow if they have any future. Nature either refers to such a past or future, and natural rights do, too. Mead's social self has two aspects which

correspond to the past/future distinction, and since it is the social self which has natural rights, these two aspects of the self suggest themselves as the framework for my discussion of Mead on rights.

Every (social) self, Mead holds, is a process with two distinguishable phases which he names the "I" and the "me." The "me" represents the sum of the social experience of the self and can be understood as the determination which the past has made of the present structure of the self. The "I" represents the reaction the self makes to the "me," to the determinations of society. One's society speaks to the self

through the self in the "me" and the self answers it back in the "I." In relation to rights, the "me" has rights, but the "I" asserts them and it was the "I" 's assertiveness that obtained them in the first

place (MSS, p. 199). The "me" possesses the settled rights everyone grants; the "I" acquires rights, or tries to, increasing the settled store of rights as changed circumstances require:



George Herbert Mead on Human Rights 201

The relative values of the "me" and the "I" depend very much on the situation. If one is maintaining his property in the community, it is of primary importance that he is a member of that community, for it is his taking of the attitude of the others that guarantees him the recognition of his own rights. To be a "me" under these circumstances is the important thing. (MSS, p. 199)

But if the acquiring of a new right rather than the maintaining of the old is in question, then the "I" is emphasized.

The demand is freedom from conventions, from given laws. Of course, such a situation is only possible where the individual appeals, so to speak, from a narrow and restricted community to a larger one. ... In that case there is the attitude of the "I" as over against the "me." (MSS, p. 199)

The "me," then, maintains the past's portion of rights and the "I" is that force for the future which keeps issues of rights always arising. Since animals have no selves, no "I" or "me," no past or future con- sciously operating to control their present behavior, "animals have no rights" (MSS, p. 183).

Somewhat like the distinction between the "I" and the "me," or between the future and the past, is Mead's distinction between the matter and the form of rights. He discusses rights in something like the Kantian way of considering the form of a moral act apart from its matter. The form of rights is explicated in Mead's constantly recurring explanations or how social selves arise, especially how the "me" arises. The "me" is the social component of the self. It consists of habits, ways of living and making a living, that are shared by members of the community. Hence these habitual responses have become institutionalized. Our institutions consist of shared habits to which we feel obliged, and insofar as an individual knows what they are, he has incorporated them in the "me." He has, then, within his own experience, shared attitudes of members of the community, the "generalized other." The

generalized other incorporated in the "me" is exemplified in our institutional practices, in the present habits or responses of each toward a given kind of situation. As we will see, just as our shared or community attitudes change, so our institutions and our rights may change and,



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correspondingly, the "me" and the generalized other change also. The matter of rights, their content, is not given with the fact that we have rights, even if these rights are specified by name and defined by law. Even if we have a right to our freedom, it is abstract to say only this unless there is a further specification of what obstacles we are free from. It is the "I" which is constantly asserting the claims to new contents which make new rights or make otherwise merely formal rights and freedom concrete. To the "I," then, attaches the matter or content of our rights and to the "me" attaches their form. This is the principle of division of the ensuing three parts of this essay. The next section is on the form of rights and on the wide past agreement which makes the

possession of rights by the "me" in each of us so clear. The section after that is on the matter or content of rights. The last section concerns how the claims of the "I" constantly change the content of rights or add new rights as circumstances change, and how democratic institutions and individuality facilitate these advances in rights.

II. The Form of Rights Settled in the "Me"

Every self has rights and only selves have rights. A human biological individual acquires selfhood and rights at the same time and in the same

process. A self is a subject of consciousness which can become its own object. One is conscious of his self when he responds to his own behavior (gesture) as does another. To do this the individual must take the role of the other. He must break out of the immediate specious present and

anticipate the oncoming response to his own gesture. If he can do this, his gesture has the same meaning for him that it has for another. That is, the meaning is shared and communicable. In other words, when an individual conceives of his own action as a phase of a more inclusive social act, he has a self. When one deliberately tries to control the oncoming phase of a social act by his gesture, he has assumed responsibility, a re-

sponsibility which also entails the rights of others. When a child says "please pass the bread," he is obliged to take it when it is passed to him.

Rights and obligations emerge naturally out of the human social process, and they are entailed by the very existence of selves.

The self thinks of actions to be performed as stimuli eliciting responses from others. Some of these anticipated responses are understood as

peculiar to particular people he knows. But other anticipated responses are envisioned as common to everyone. The mature self has abstracted a common core from the responses of the particular others with whom he




has interacted and guides his conduct by the imagined attitude of this

"generalized other." The responses of the generalized other become part of the self through education. Mead explains education as "the process of taking over a certain organized set of responses to one's own stimulation . . ." (MSS, p. 265). These organized responses as stimulated by self or others in definite recurring situations are what we would term the "institutions" of our community (MSS, p. 261). "Institutions are ... the habits of individuals in their interrelation with each other . . ." (MT, p. 364). These institutions or "social habits" (MT, p. 376) become ours by education, and indeed, education is one such institution (PA, p. 625). Other institutions of modern society which Mead distinguishes and describes include the Church (MT, p. 12), the state or government, the

family, property, the university (MT, p. 21; SW, p. 225), the court

(MT, p. 368), science and art (SW, p. 406), morals, manners and conventions (MSS, p. 263). Conventions to Mead mean arbitrary customs, "isolated social responses which would not ... go to make up ... the nature of the community in its essential character as this expresses itself in the social reactions" (MSS, p. 263). The other institutions "are

organically related to each other in a way which conventions are not"

(MSS, p. 263) and there would be no suth thing as society without them. Mead sometimes lists rights as another entry in his lists of those

common responses or social habits which are institutions essential to

society (PA, p. 625), but he more frequently - and we must assume, more accurately - speaks of the rights that go along with each of these institutions. He thus speaks of "the rights of education" (MT, p. 12), or "the family with its rights" (SW, p. 225). Wherever such institutions exist, rights exist. Rights, then, are common responses that have been

institutionalized, and institutions are essential to the existence of human societies. Each social institution prescribes patterns of behavior expected and respected in one's society, and rights, accordingly, are the roles which individuals take following these patterns insofar as others can expect and

respect one's actions (MSS, p. l6l). "Society" to Mead is a shorthand term which designates the institutions

to which rights attach. Society refers to the interaction or cooperative actions of selves. All intelligent action, Mead agrees with Aristotle, is for the sake of some good. Social actions seek social goods. A social

action, witness a fight or a wedding, involves many selves because the

good which it seeks cannot be achieved by one alone, nor can it be

possessed by one alone. Even the winner in a prizefight does not realize



204 JOSEPH BETZ

all the good which comes from boxing, just as the loser is not alone in experiencing its suffering and discomfort. Where social goods can be recognized, where what was before an individual and private good can be seen to be more genuinely and securely a common and public good, there rights arise. Rights always attach to public goods.

Actually, for Mead, there are no merely private goods just as there are no merely private languages. Every good is in structure social, even as every self of necessity includes a "me" component corresponding to the generalized other. Greedy men seek money, yet there is no money without a social system of exchange, it is a good only in human society, and even if they seek gold, a natural metal, they seek something which has value only because of social conventions. Or imagine another good, education. It is impossible that there should ever be only one educated man. The man who tries to hoard education for himself alone makes his own education impossible. So, too, with other goods, all are in structure social. To deny that a particular value is social is to deny that it is related to the "me" component of the self.

Even so, though education, money, and the like are in structure social goods, they may be pursued as private goods in any situation in which socialization is incomplete. What then is the difference between a private and a public or social good? It is the difference between a dog's bone and a man's property:

A dog will fight any other dog trying to take the bone. The dog is not taking the attitude of the other dog. A man who says "This is my property" is taking an attitude of the other person. The man is appealing to his rights because he is able to take the attitude which everybody else in the group has with reference to property .... (MSS, p. 162)

Or, again, the difference between a private and a public good is the difference between the possessions of the criminal or the savage acquired by might and the possessions of the civilized man acquired in a lawful way, according to a socially approved method, that is, by right:

What one wants is possession guaranteed by the community itself. He wants property; he does not want mere possession. Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but it does not become valuable unless it is the law. (MT, p. 18)




Specific others may make claims against us, perhaps claims for privileges for themselves, which we might recognize and, to avoid unpleasantness, grant. Still, such claims are rights only if they are also the claims, stipulated through the "me," of the generalized other in our society, only if everyone may in turn claim the privileges in whatever situation they are claimed and if it is open to everyone to stand in such a situation and make the claims. If there were, per impossible, a state of nature, what Hobbes and Locke called natural rights in it would be mere powers. Rights are mutually recognized powers and mutual recognition can occur only in society (SW, p. 160). On the other hand, as the preceding analysis should make clear, though rights only exist in society, they are not conferred by society upon an individual who comes, hat in hand, humbly seeking a boon, (SW, p. 162). Rather, the structure of society is in the institutions to which rights attach. The rights are an integral part of our social structure.

That rights exist only in society and that rights are - in a sense -

society is another way of saying that rights are universal, "universal because in asserting his rights the individual recognized them as belong- ing to others also" (MT, p. 13). In society, everyone has rights insofar as he is fully incorporated into the social whole. The man who is conscious of his rights is not only conscious of the rights of others, but also of the social unity which exists between himself and others. We think our common bonds insofar as we are conscious of rights and have thought out what functions rights entail for the various members of society. But this thinking out what functions our rights protect and how they involve a commonality of social goods is difficult. There is a tempting short cut to the sense of community. Instead of laboriously thinking it out, we are tempted to feel it by giving vent to our primitive impulses. The primitive impulse which best serves this purpose is the hostile impulse, the native tendency to crush the other in asserting one's own individuality. If we all can be united in a common hatred towards outsiders, our collective sense of self is strengthened even though, simultaneously, social selfhood is undermined. In the social self, the hostile impulse is not suppressed or deracinated but becomes the tendency to functional self-assertion in the competitive situations familiar in sports, school, business and even love (SW, p. 216). The socialized form of the self thus controls the primitive matter of the hostile impulse of the biological organism, and social unity results from this control of our conscious minds over the matter of primitive impulse. In contrast, when the common hate of the enemy is culti-



206 JOSEPH BETZ

vated to give a felt, rather than thought unity to one's society, the primitive matter of impulse controls our conscious minds. Where there is no operative mind, there is no self, no society of selves, no recognition of rights. The hostile impulse insofar as it wrecks havoc upon rights is studied by Mead in two essays, "The Psychology of Punitive Justice" and "National Mindedness and International Mindedness."

In "The Psychology of Punitive Justice" (SW, pp. 212-239), Mead studies how the usual attitude of socially-sanctioned hostility towards the criminal corrupts our conception of rights, especially the right of property. The thief, for instance, breaks the law and invades our rights, but "it is not the detailed operation of the law in defining the invasion of rights and their proper preservation that is the center of our interest but the capture and punishment of the ... enemy The respect for the law is the obverse side of our hatred for the criminal aggressor" (SW, p. 221). "The revulsions against criminality reveal themselves in a sense of solidarity with the group, a sense of being a citizen . . ." (SW, p. 222), a sense of standing beside other good men in defending our property against criminals.

But social unity based upon the common attitude of the defense of property, because it is emotional and not thought out, becomes a block to the definition of property and its statement in terms of social uses and functions. If rights attach to property, it is because it is a social good, but there might be nothing at all good for society in the private ownership, control and deflection to purely private profit of what is a public resource. Perhaps some things should not be subject to the rights of private property, and whether they should or should not cannot be adequately discussed or determined if the only definition of the right is in terms of its violation. Mead explains it this way:

The individual who is defending his own rights against tres- passes is led to state even his family and more general social interests in abstract individualistic terms. Abstract individualism and a negative conception of liberty in terms of the freedom from restraints become the working ideas in the community Wherever criminal justice, the modern elaborate development of the taboo, the ban, and their consequences in a primitive society, organizes and formulates public sentiment in defense of social goods and institutions against actual or prospective enemies, there we find that the definition of the enemies, in




other words the criminals, carries with it the definition of the

goods and institutions. It is the revenge of the criminal upon the society which crushes him. The concentration of public sentiment upon the criminal which mobilizes the institution of

justice, paralyzes the undertaking to conceive our common goods in terms of their uses. (SW, p. 226)

There is another way, Mead argues. It is the mode of procedure of civil and juvenile courts. Instead of crushing the defendant so that the communal desire for vengeance will be satisfied as in the criminal court,

civil law proceedings are undertaken and carried out with the intent of defining and readjusting social situations without the hostile attitudes which characterize the criminal procedure. The

parties to the civil proceedings belong to the same group and continue to belong to this group, whatever decision is rendered. No stigma attaches to the one who loses. (SW, p. 222, n. 5)

Similarity, the juvenile court, at its best, undertakes:

to reach and understand the causes of social and individual breakdown, to mend if possible the defective situation and rein- state the individual at fault. This is not attended with any weakening of the sense of the values that are at stake, but a

great part of the paraphernalia of hostile procedure is absent.

(SW, p. 231)

These procedures are more time-consuming, more difficult, and require a

dispassionate thoughtfulness absent in more impulsive procedures, but they allow the self and it rights to be more clearly conceived and valued. Only in this way do we retain our selfhood, retain our thought-out roles within a functional unity, and retain our individuality while, at the same time, we experience social solidarity. "Just m proportion as we organize by hostility do we suppress individuality" (SW, p. 228).

Just as "The Psychology of Punitive Justice" explains how the hostile

impulse can be used to unite a group against individual enemies or criminals, so "National Mindedness and International Mindedness" (SW, pp. 355-370) explains how the hostile impulse can be used to unite a



208 JOSEPH BETZ

group against the national enemy, the foreign nation filled with war criminals. But to achieve social solidarity in this way is to sacrifice selves and their rights once again:

The hostile impulse unites us against the common enemy, because it has force enough to break down customary social textures, by which we hold others at a distance from our inex- pugnable selves. But it was this social structure by which we realized ourselves. Our rights and our priviliges, our distinctions of capacity and skill, our superiorities and our inferiorities, our social positions and prestige, our manners and our foibles not only distinguish and separate us from others but they constitute us what we are to ourselves. (SW, pp. 356-357)

To enter this emotional society of haters, then, is to abdicate our mem- bership in the thoughtful society of self -controlling selves, to give up our right to self-determination.

The threat of the criminal to property, family and the like resulted in a negative and defensive definition of the rights associated with those institutions - his revenge on us for our hate of him. Mead does not say so, but it follows from his principles that the threat of the enemy nation to our political institutions has resulted in a negative and defensive definition of the rights associated with those institutions - its revenge on us for our hate of it. To see the truth of this, one has only to think of how the right of a people to self-government, the right of a people to determine the foreign policy of its government, the right of a small nation to existence because it is a nation are all understood in America today in terms only of a so-called "Communist threat" to them. Democratic free- doms are reduced to the right to be free from Communism, imposed by America on itself and on other nations as a duty, and no civil or constitutional right is secure if its free operation impedes the fight against the Communist menace. Our hatred of Communism has rendered us unable to give functional definition to the democratic rights we are supposed to be enjoying and defending.

The man with a right enjoys it because he knows that the others involved with him in the common social enterprise acknowledge it. This

acknowledgement is ordinarily referred to as the sense of obligation. The

sociality of Mead's self nicely explains how obligation accompanies a

right. One is a self because his behavior is a phase of a social process and




because one can view his action from the perspectives of the other participants in a social act. Rights and obligations entail each other. Accordingly, one realizes that what is a right in him is an obligation in others and what are rights in others are obligations in him. "No man can claim a right who does not at the same time affirm his own obligation to respect that right in all others0 (MT, p. 13).

Mead insists that the sense of obligation entailed by rights is not the mere threat of harm to us, not social pressure, not an external force operating upon us. Obligation, what Mead often calls "social control," arises within the self and does not arise without choice:

The individual . . . finds himself taking the same attitude toward himself that the community takes. This, of course, is what gives the principle of social control, not simply the social control that results from blind habit, but a social control that comes from the individual assuming the same attitude toward himself that the community assumes toward him He will recognize what are his duties as well as what are his rights. (MT, pp. 376-377)

Acting impulsively is not the same as acting from a sense of obligation (SW, pp. 392-397). Obligation implies an impulse to act plus a judg- ment resulting in a choice. "Obligation arises only with choice; not only when impulses are in conflict with each other, but when within this conflict they are valued in terms of their anticipated results'* (SW, pp. 392-393).

When we feel the obligation of a monetary debt, we do not

simply hespond to the stimuli which others embody - paying debts is not merely succumbing to pressure. We speak to ourselves, however unwillingly, with the voice of the creditor and of the community, assessing ourselves with the obligation. (SW, p. 394)

Sometimes, when Mead relates rights to obligations, he also relates

rights to law. He writes, for instance, that:

If you can make your demand universal, if your right is one that carries with it a corresponding obligation, then you recog-



210 JOSEPH BETZ

nize the same right in everyone else, and you can give a law so to speak, in the terms of all the community. (1927) (MSS, p. 287, n. 17)

Laws based on rights which their possessor both claims for himself and acknowledges in others will be universal and fully democratic. Mead claims to have learned this from Rousseau, whose doctrine on rights he much admires (Cf. MT, p. 13). The alternative to this democratic scheme or rights-based law in which "the individual is the source of the institutions" and obligation is self-imposed is "a society established by force" in which obligation is imposed from without.

That democratic laws are based on individual rights is, in Mead's estimation, good; but it is not good that the rights need the protection which the laws give them. The first sense of law to Mead would seem to be that pattern within each self in a civilized society whereby he is a law to himself. Insofar as society requires government with a legislature, statute laws, courts, police, jails and all the other apparatus for the enforcements of rights, then law in the first and internal sense does not exist and socialization is incomplete. The self forced to act as he does

by external compulsive laws is also incomplete. Rights are institutions, and the laws enforcing rights which would otherwise go unacknowledged are institutions also, but institutions of another order. If rights as first- order institutions are insufficiently recognized, then laws and the political institutions which enforce them are needed as a second-order corrective. Rather than institutions of this second sort being civilization itself, rather than government being the glory of society, the presence of these institutions and of government proves insufficient civilizing and incomplete socialization. It is sad, but true, then, that "human rights are never in such danger as when their only defenders are political institutions and their officers" (SW, p. 169). "Every right that comes up for protection by our courts or other constitutional institution is confessedly in a form which is incomplete and inadequate, because it represents a social situation which is incomplete and inadequate" (SW, p. 169).

III. The Content of Rights

To this point the form of rights, the structure of rights in the "me" has been stressed. The "me" internalizes the generalized other, the voice of the community. As an individual becomes a self, there arises within




him the expectation that certain of his claims will be recognized or satisfied by others just as he will recognize and satisfy the claims of others. Much of the past history of his society is incorporated within him as he learns that he and others have rights. But just what these rights are is never completely given with past social history. As men move into the future the contents of old rights change and new rights are recognized, often for those who had no rights before. This section explains the changing content of rights, the next section explains changes in the subjects of rights. Rights have moved to the present and the future from the past when their content is discussed.

Mead's pragmatism, like Dewey's, stresses the organism in its environ- ment, the self in society, the being of whatever kind in its context, situation or circumstances. Rights are always defined contextually, in their circumstances. We become conscious of some part of our context, usually, only when there is a problem with it. So it is with rights. "A right . . . comes to consciousness through some infraction" (SW, p. 162), when there is something at hand hindering the expression of the power it involves. Accordingly, the modern doctrine of natural rights arose with the revolutionary temper to ̂prescribe how present social injustices could be remedied by some ideal political order of the future. The rights of the new order were defined in terms of the obstacles to their expression in the old. Hence, in the French constitution of

September 23, 1795:

We find liberty defined in terms of taking away liberty and other rights to be defined, equality in terms of the absence of legal distinctions, security in terms of its source, property in terms of the absence of interference with its use, whatever it may be. But to the minds of men of the year four, these definitions had definite contents, because they were undertaking to determine the conditions under which certain powers which it did not even occur to them to define might be exercised. (SW, p. 153)

That is, even if rights are defined negatively, they still have some

positive content since they are defined in relation to the particular hindrances present at the time. However, time robs rights so defined of their definite content (SW, pp. 154-155).

Though we are as specific as possible, this negative content of the



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definition of rights cannot be avoided. For instance, "the natural right to liberty may be rendered by the pregnant phrase that there is no freedom except under the law ... ; but it will tell you nothing of what you are at liberty to do" (SW, p. 158). Even if we formulate an adequate statement of what positive content freedom has for the average man at this moment:

the next struggle for liberty . . . will arise out of some infraction that will not have reference to the definition which we have formulated of what man should be and, consequently, of what constitute his liberties. On the contrary, we will find in all probability that the struggle will lead to a quite different definition from the one with which we started .... The contents of our so-called natural rights have always been formulated negatively, with reference to restrictions to be overcome. When these restrictions have been overcome they represent a

positive content of what we call for the time being our liberties (SW, p. 159).

Whatever is positive in the definition of freedom or other rights, then, must be forever worked out anew, forever determined once again for changing circumstances and more modern times.

There is an apparent contradiction between what Mead says here and what I quoted him as saying before. Here, in passages taken from "Natural Rights and the Theory of the Political Institution," Mead stresses that rights are defined negatively and cannot help but be defined

negatively. Before, in talking about our attitude towards criminals in "The Psychology of Punitive Justice" (which was written four years after the other essay), Mead complains that rights are defined negatively but should not be. How is it that we cannot help but define rights negatively yet should not define rights negatively?

The apparent contradiction is removed by a distinction specifying what are the negative opposites or hindrances to the exercise of rights. Criminals are one sort of hindrance to the exercise of rights, especially property rights. Criminals we always have with us, and they are always with us in the same form. Embezzlers are recognizably the same whether

they are embezzling dollars or dinarii. Robbers are recognizably the same whether they are robbing wallets or bags of gold. Burglars are

recognizably the same whether they are burglarizing bank vaults or




castle treasure rooms. Criminal activity is overt and is an unmistakable threat to rights. It is easiest to envision the threats to rights which embezzlers, robbers and burglars present, and thus the temptation to define the rights in terms of their defense against such criminals. But the consequence of this is that we have not stated our rights in that positive form which allows us to see how they achieve some social good, how they function in the communal interest. The same property which we are prohibiting to the thief is defined and guarded in such a way as to prohibit that taxation which would realize the right to education of our children. This is the harmful way of defining rights negatively which Mead complains about.

The other way of defining rights negatively does not prohibit the endeavor to state their social function and guarantee that the right makes some social good possible. Criminals are one sort of hindrance to the expression of rights, but another limiting factor is other rights, powers, privileges, recognized liberties. The negatively defined rights of the revolutionary French constitution were the rights of the privilegeless masses as defined in opposition to the rights of the privileged classes. Criminals are overtly the enemies of rights at all times and for all conditions of society, but privileged aristocrats are the enemies of rights only in some circumstances. It is perhaps the case that the privileges of the aristocrats are justified by their social function. Their lords had more rights than serfs because the lords had the responsibility for protecting the serfs and performed that responsibility serviceably well in a time when protection was all-important. As times change, though, and national governments come to provide this protection while nobles preserve their privileges, then they exact a payment without providing a service. Thus, their privileges or rights are held at the expense of the priviliges or rights of the lower classes, are not universalized, and are not - to that extent - rights. These lords might possess the land but, to Mead, they lack a property right to it. With such changes as these, aristocrats become like criminals but are so unintentionally, covertly, and not obviously.

The acceptable sense in which rights must be defined negatively, then, is not in relation to the robber's bullying might but in relation to privileged classes' traditional rights. Rights must be defined in relation to their effect on others' rights: the rights of a lower class in relation to the rights of a higher; the rights of a newly self- conscious group in society in relation to the rights established



214 JOSEPH BETZ

groups; the right to property in relation to the right of education; the right to freedom of speech in relation to the right to one's repu- tation, and so on. Rights must be understood in relation to the whole context of rights. This is necessarily negative in that my right of a certain type can be allowed only as much positive content as it can exercise without infringing on the same content for your right. As much liberty for each as liberty for all is the negative bound of my liberty because, pushed beyond that boundary, my liberty becomes your servility and our relationship has become assymmetrical (MT, p. 22).

What Mead says of ends is true of rights as ends: "it is impossible to discover their real import unless they can all be brought into

relationship with each other" (SW, p. 232). The real import so discovered is that one's asserted claim has indeed the stature of a right because it can harmoniously co-exist with similar claims asserted by others, which are then rights too; or that one's claim defeats other's claims and so, is not a right. At different times and in different circumstances, men claim different things, and so it is that rights are always changing. Freedom includes freedom from, and what one claims to be freed from changes. The freedom of blacks to vote is

quite different from the freedom of laborers to unionize but both are part of the positive content of the right to freedom in America at this time. And these rights are functionally positive if not sub-

stantively so. They do envision liberty as making possible a society in which blacks and whites, labor and management are effectively equal. If the property right of adults is defined in relation to the educational right of children, then property will function for the common interest. In spite, then, of the negative definition all rights must have in general, every right examined and enforced in relation to the particular context of its times can have a positive content - at least for awhile.

There is one right which seems to Mead to be clearer and to have more positive content of itself than do other rights. This is the

right to property (MT, pp. 13, 22). Mead gives -some attention to the rights to freedom, equality, education and a few others, but most attention to property. Because possession seems more positive than freedom or other rights, Rousseau and Locke tried to make it the basis for the organization of society (MT, p. 22; SW, pp. 155-157). What Rousseau said of actions with regard to property, Kant generalized to make the basis of his moral philosophy (MT, pp. 26-27), just as Mead made it the basis of his theory of institutions and the mutual




responses of selves which sustain institutions. But Mead does not appear to believe that society can be organized around any one right, for no right is definite enough of itself. Even if Mead does believe that the property right has more definite content than most other rights, his writings include many examples of how the property right must be modified with changes in circumstance and in other rights (e.g., SW, pp. 225, 233, 405). Mead appeals to the evidence of history for support. The failure of the French Revolution proved that "it was not possible to build up a new community on the abstract rights of men" (MT, p. 60). The success of the American revolution proved the same point, for "the American government was not an institution built upon abstract rights" (MT, p. 60). "The government that was set up was based on the liberal institutions that had been carried over from England and had gone through the fire of the long colonial period," not on the abstractions of the Declaration of Independence (MT, p. 60). Only the concrete rights obtained by particular men in the course of their histories have definite content, then, not any right abstractly conceived, not even that to property, let alone those of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

IV. Institutional and Individual Advances in Rights:

As was explained previously, we first learn of our rights and of others' rights as we acquire selfhood in our society. The aspect of the self in which is found the established pattern of rights as imported from our society, Mead calls the "me." The "me" makes social control and social stability possible insofar as it internalizes the

generalized other. The "me" has established rights and respects established rights since it includes institutionalized habits or custom. If everyone already had all the rights which he should have, then the settled rights of the "me" would be sufficient. But at any given moment, not everyone enjoys all of the rights he should have, and some people enjoy more "rights" than they should have, with both sorts of inequities resulting from historical "lag." As suggested above, historical lag is often necessary inasmuch as new rights and obligations can be formulated only after the innovation of new means of carrying on the social process. These means are predominantly the result of advances in science and technology. Yet, according to Mead, there are mechanisms for creative advance in rights. There is an open future,



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one not determined by past social policy, and the "I" perdominates in this open future just as the "me" predominates in the closed past.

The "I" functions to bring about advances in rights in two ways. First, the self-assertiveness of the "I" is the source of claims which lead to the conflict of rights. The more democracy there is, the more individual assertiveness is encouraged, and the more conflict over rights there will be. Democracy, however, recognizes that it encourages functional individuality and self-assertiveness and has institutionalized ways of dealing with it. The "me" of the democratic man, then, is conventionally trained to tolerate unconventional "I" 's. We should not, however, think of democracy as guaranteeing conflicts and problems concerning rights. Rather, it is a method of settling conflicts. In an open society conflicts will arise from time to time because of advances in science, industry, and technology. New instrumental devices, new ways of making a living, must be coordinated with custom, institutions, and the generalized other. This often requires changing our institutions or at least adding to their structure. For example, the innovation of the automobile calls for tremendous re- organizations involving new rights and obligations. Every reconstruction comes not from the generalized other, from the status quo. Rather, it comes from the "I" component of an individual. It is creative, and often, as we will see, requires genius. Democracy makes room for the innovation and the genius. That is, genuine democracies allow the selves developing within them great opportunities to take the attitudes of many different kinds of people, even the attitudes of those who oppose democracy. The democratic "me" should thus be uniquely open to reactions of the assertive "I" to it, and is prepared to give them their hearing and to satisfy, as far as possible, their claims. How democracy has institutionalized ways of dealing with the claims to rights of the self-assertive individual it encourages is the first way in which the "I" brings about advances in rights. Democracy expects the unexpected.

Second, besides institutions which allow for individualism and which settle claims to rights arising between the self-assertiveness of different individuals, there is the possibility of an individual so great as to create new institutions which carry with them previously unrecognized rights. With the "I" goes not only the self-assertiveness of ordinary men but also the creativity or genius of extraordinary ones. Democracy should expect unconventional behavior and can prepare for it, but no




system can do more than hope for genius and no system can prepare itself for it. Every man has an "I" which asserts something against his "me" and the generalized other which the "me" represents, and thus leaves it a little bit different, and every man has a right to make this difference, but no man has a right to make the difference which the overpowering "I" of a "world-historical individual" makes as he leaves us with expanded rights. He is the man whose "I" speaks so strongly to conventions that he changes them. This section treats, then, how democracy arose, and how its institutions settle conflicts of rights between assertive "I" 's and how some "I" 's are so remarkable as to leave democracy with modified or new institutions.

Rights come into being when common goods are discovered. One common good which has been discovered is that it is desirable to have procedures whereby goods claiming to be common goods can be examined and recognized. This discovery is the basis for democratic institutions. The common goods which underlie democratic rights and institutions become conceivable with the overcoming of:

the temporal and spatial separations of men so that they are brought into closer interrelation with each other. Means of intercommunications have been the great civilizing agents. The multiple social stimulation of an indefinite number of varied contacts of a vast number of individuals with each other is the fertile field out of which spring social organizations, for these make possible the larger social life that can absorb the hostilities of different groups. When this condition has been supplied there seems to be an inherent tendency in social groups to advance from the hostile attitudes of individuals and groups toward each other through rivalries, competitions, and cooperations toward a functional self-assertion which recognizes and utilizes other selves and groups of selves in the activities in which social human nature expresses itself. (SW, p. 230)

Not only does hostility between groups become functional self-assertion within the society, but group differences are broken down as one learns to take the attitude of the foreigner.

More than any other means, modern journalism with its human interest stories, the modern realistic novel, modern drama especially as presented on radio, television, and in the movies, has had this effect of breaking down differences between men.



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Castes or class differences arose, Mead suggests, when the enemy outside the group was brought into the group. At first, enemies, conquered in war, were killed. It was then discovered that they had functional value if they were allowed to live and so were made slaves (MSS, p. 318, n. 20). Here was a first step in rendering functional the hostile impulse. With advances in civilization, slaves became serfs, serfs became peasants, peasants became laborers, laborers became employees, employees become self-employed, and the employers of others as their self-assertion was channelled into gradually developing economic institutions. With such changes has that democracy arisen in which each man recognizes the same rights in others which he claims for himself. "Democracy ... is an attitude which depends upon the type of self which goes with the universal relations of brotherhood, however that be reached" (MSS, p. 286). 'The democratic order undertakes to wipe caste difference out and to make everyone sovereign and

everyone a subject" (MSS, p. 319). In democratic institutions, ''one wills for himself what he wills for everyone; . . . one obeys the volitions of others because he identifies them with his own volitions"

(SW, p. 20). To Mead, there is no democracy without mutual recognition of

rights. But what is unique about modern democracy to Mead is that it is especially flexible in allowing for advance in rights, for the

development of new rights and the extension of old rights to previously suppressed classes. Before democracy, the subversion of the form of

government by periodic revolution was necessary for disadvantaged groups to assert themselves and to win rights. Democracy, Mead likes to say, has made revolution a permanent institution within a form of

government. Democracy:

incorporated the principle of revolution into institutions. That is, when you set up a constitution and one of the articles in it is that the constitution may be changed, then you have, in a certain sense, incorporated the very process of revolution into the order of society. Only now it is to be an ordered, a constitutional revolution by such and such steps. (MT, p. 361)

There are, of course, other democratic constitutional rights besides the right to amend the constitution which allow for advance in rights. American democracy guarantees a general sort of right to press for




rights through the Bill of Rights, especially freedom of speech, and through the way legislation is proposed and adopted and conflicts of rights are settled in the courts.

The way democratic legislatures and courts operate in advancing in rights is to Mead but a special instance of the way thought operates in advancing in truth, or of the way ethical thought operates in advancing in morality, that is, in making a correct moral decision. The modern scientist seems the best example to Mead of a well-trained thinker. At any given time, the scientist holds as true whatever theory explains all the facts concerning his subject. But new observations add new facts which cannot be explained on the old theory. As these new facts increase, the need for the reconstruction of the theory becomes more apparent. The scientist who is usually the best in the field is the source of the reconstructing idea. He happens upon a new

hypothesis which expands the old theory, modifies it, or perhaps amounts to a whole new theory. If the new hypothesis accounts for all the facts to be explained, if it works as proven by well-designed experi- ments, then it enters science as newly discovered truth. Such have been the physical theories of Newton and later of Einstein, or the

physiological theory of Darwin. Ethics proceeds in a similar way, but it is not facts that ethical

thought takes into account, it is interests or values. A situation

requiring ethical thought is one in which there are conflicting interests or values. The ethically correct decision is the one which finds a place for all interests, just as the scientifically true theory is the one which finds a place for all facts (Cf. MSS, p. 387).

Since rights are interests, common interests, and attach to values, common values, conflicts of rights are special cases of the ethical conflict of interests or values and must be handled in the same way. The

proper solution to a conflict of rights is one which acknowledges all claims as far as possible. This process of adjustment and readjust- ment is always going on informally in society, but where the informal

process does not lead to a successful outcome, something more is

necessary. This is the place of legislatures and courts. In legislatures and courts diverse interests can come into the open

and display themselves for what they are. If an interest can prove itself a common interest in these public forums, then a right should attach to it and legislatures and courts will recognize this by enforcing it. Probably the legislature serves this function better than the courts,



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"for it is in the legislature that it is possible to present more fully the human interests that are involved" (SW, p. 166). Both delay action until thought can operate, until social inquiry can take place. This delay should not so much serve established interests, rather "the drag which we put by means of both of them upon the changes in the structure in our society serves only the purpose of enabling all the interests that are involved in the issue at stake to come to the surface and be adequately estimated" (SW, p. 166).

Institutions like legislatures and courts "are legitimate when they make possible the complete presentation of the case" (SW, p. 170). But society is most fully integrated when rights are recognized without appeal to legislatures and courts. If they are appealed to, the next best situation is that, as the case for them is presented, the issues will become so clear that the rights will be recognized without the need for enforcement. The worst situation is that in which the legislatures or courts recognize rights which can only be accepted by the

public if they are strictly enforced by the government. The enforcement of rights by government is at best a holding action which buys time until the rights are recognized and spontaneously acknowledged in society.

These actions for rights in constitutions, courts, and legislatures are the institutional processes for advance in rights but they do not tell the whole story. Science is an institution which makes possible advance in truth, but the institution would be of little value were it not for great individual scientists who periodically make great advances. So it is in morals and in the social recognition of rights. Many of the rights we have, we have because of innovations made by moral geniuses. Institutions give us rights, but there is no right to the genius which can create or expand institutions. Mead gives con- siderable attention to how such genius functions.

In general, a moral genius is like a great scientist who discovers a new hypothesis to account for all the facts. The genius is the man whose "I" makes the strongest and most significant answers to the

questions the "me" asks. His reactions and criticisms to the general position of society insofar as it speaks within him in the generalized other are the reactions and criticisms which leave it a different

generalized other than it was previous to its incorporation in his "me." His "I," then, changes the "me" 's of all of us as it changes the




generalized other and modifies our institutionalized or shared habits (Cf. MSS, pp. 386-387).

Only the thoroughly democratic society affords full rights to all of its members. The generalized other in which the recognition of rights is found is restricted in its generality in any non-democratic society. The society with class differences restricts the development of its common attitudes, and without common attitudes, or with attitudes common only to a certain class, there is no community and only restricted selfhood. How can the narrow attitudes toward rights be broadened in such a society? Can one who developed selfhood as a response to its narrow social structure take the broader point of view necessary to reconstruct it? Is moral genius possible?

Mead argues that it is. Society not only gives us our selves in the pattern of our society, it also gives us a mind by means of which we might reconstruct the pattern of our society (MSS, p. 263, n. 10). When conflict of rights or conflict arising with the claim for rights occurs in society, and the present institutions of society cannot process those claims, then the present social arrangement proves itself too narrow for the situation. Enlargement, extension of the bounds of the community is called for. This enlargement must initially occur

intellectually in the mind of some individual, some creative "I," who mediates in its social actualization. Creative moral geniuses can see

rights in the rightless and can see the possibility of institutions to validate these rights though the institutions do not yet exist. They live mentally in a community which does not yet materially exist. The members of the community which does exist often think of the

genius as a maverick, a law-breaker, a civil disobedient, at least at first. The criminal lives mentally in a smaller social order than the one which presently exists (MSS, p. 265). The moral genius lives

mentally in a larger social order. Since neither live by the norms of the present social order, people confuse the two, and the moral

genius is called a criminal. However, the moral genius bears the

stigma of this disapproval because he is simultaneously enjoying the more important approval of the wider community implied as the ful- fillment of the narrower one which now exists (MSS, pp. 167-168).

Few of us have the moral genius of a prophet, of Christ or Socrates, but all of us can feel the claims of the broader community. Mead's

essay, "Philanthropy from the Point of View of Ethics" (SW, pp. 392-407) concerns this. The problem examined in the essay is this:



222 JOSEPH BETZ

Many of us feel more than an impulse to be charitable to others; we feel an obligation to be charitable. Obligation in us is correlative to rights in others. But charity by definition is not a matter of right. How is it that this obligation to be charitable can exist?

Mead's answer is that, though giving to others is charity in the present social order, it is justice in the point of view of a more ideal social order. Those that feel the obligation to be charitable recognize this broader social order as a better one and are already living mentally in it. In this more ideal society, the poor have rights which we experience as obligations against our property, and so, we give to charity. "When the charitable impulse does carry a sense of obligation with it, we always imply a desirable social order within which the goods our charity confers would come to the recipients as their due or a part of their proper equipment for life in the community" (SW, p. 396). "The feel of this obligation . . . may be formulated in the belief in another world, a world to come, or in another golden age that lies behind" (SW, p. 400). But if the feel of this obligation becomes nothing more than a prayer begging the advent of the world to come, rather than a program of social reconstruction in the world here and now, then it has been mischannelled, sidetracked. Ideal social orders should function as sources of hypotheses for the improvement of actual social problems, not as kingdoms in the sky entered only by those who show princely generosity only in their dreams (SW, pp. 404-405).

Rights, then, which always exist in communities, might exist in either the present community or in that ideal community which is

implied by the deficiencies of the present one. The "me" is the citizen of the first community, the "I" of the second. Great "I" 's can guide the "me" 's of the rest of us into the broader social order, and serve as standing invitations to become great "I" 's ourselves.

As the criminal is intentionally a predator on a higher social order, so are we often unintentionally. We live as predators upon the poor and privilegeless of our society who need not be poor and privilegeless at all in a better society. The goods we enjoy are enjoyed privately, even though all goods are in structure public and better goods are so in both structure and substance. These higher, common goods can only be obtained by conjoint action. Rights mark the roles in these conjoint actions which everyone may play and so share in the goods. Past authors of the social drama have written the roles and past actors have played them, but in the social drama the author is actor and the




actor author, so that the roles have been continually rewritten in the course of the play itself. Let us take the role of the author then, Mead asks, and think out parts for those who have so far been barred from appearing on the stage of social life.

Villanova University

NOTES

* A briefer version of this paper was read at the symposium on "Human Rights in the American Tradition" of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, March 8, 1974, at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee.

1. This essay draws from the following four books by George Herbert Mead, hereafter cited by their initials in my text: 1) Mind, Self, and Society, ed. by Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), hereafter MSS; 2) Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Merritt H. Moore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), hereafter MT; 3) The Philosophy of the Act, ed. by Charles W. Morris et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), hereafter PA; and 4) Selected Writings, ed. by Andrew J. Reck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1964), hereafter SW.

2. Harold N. Lee's discussion piece, "Social Mind and Political Order," pp. 70-77 in the October, 1973, number of Ethics, largely concerns Mead's social theory of selfhood. But it is a law-and-order Mead and a conservative self that Lee stresses. Mead is pictured as a friend of freedom-restricting law and the order of the status quo and as an enemy of rebellion, disruption, and campus unrest. Such a portrait of Mead is composed by emphasizing only the "me," the past, only settled rights. Lee completely ignores the "I," the future, the possibility of achieving new rights and reconstructing the social order. All this is for Mead the work of a creative individuality which is far different from the obedient, socially-conditioned selfhood that Lee stresses. This section of my paper, largely on the "I," may be read as a corrective to Lee, then, although I also believe that all parts of my paper are in some way corrective of his misemphases.



george herbert mead on human rights

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