THERE can be no informed political philosophy without an adequate social ontology, which has remained a severely undeveloped area of philosophy for centuries and, therefore, hindered political philosophy. The philosopher John Searle has made a foundational contribution to the philosophy of society and social ontology that cannot be sufficiently covered here, so the reader is encouraged to read Making the Social World (2010) for further details regarding social ontology. Searle’s contributing to the ontological understanding of social institutions is essential for the conception of human rights.
The fundamental conception of human nature will impact the notion of valid social institutional structures (Searle, 2010: 132-144,). The fact that social institutions are deontological results from the nature of man as a rational (Searle, 2010: 128),[1] linguistic (Searle, 2010: 128), conscious agent capable of free choice and action (Searle, 2010: 139). When a person considers reasons, he must act by deciding on a proposition (Searle, 2001: 14).
After making this decision, he must also physically act in the form of a speech act or some other physical action in order to satisfy the conditions of satisfaction of the Intentional state of the decision (Searle, 2001: 14). This action can occur by way of an intention-in-action or prior intentions (Searle, 2001: 40-45).
Once an action has commenced, a sustained effort may be required, and additional action may be necessary to fulfill the conditions of satisfaction of the Intentional state of the decision (Searle, 2001: 15). At every stage of rational action, the agent must act within the psychological gap.[2] In this way, reasons for action do not constitute antecedent causally sufficient conditions for action as considered to be the case in Classical Rationality Theory (Searle, 2001: 12-13).
Social institutions are fundamentally linguistic in origin and structure (Searle, 2010: 12-13) and all of the speech acts constitutive of social institutions have the same logical form of declarations[3] (Searle, 2010: 12-13) and exist insofar as they are collectively recognized by way of collective Intentionality (Searle, 2010: 25).
These speech acts literally create the social institution by representing it as existing (Searle, 2010: 68) and it only exists insofar as that representation is collectively recognized. The logical structure of status function declarations automatically creates a system of rights, duties, obligations, authorizations, and permissions (Searle, 2010: 8-9). Persons can then recognize these as desire-independent reasons for actions and if, and only if, recognized and internalized, motivate action (Searle, 2010: 9).
As a result of this linguistic structure, social institutions—if collectively recognized—function structurally in organizing society by way of negative and positive deontic powers created by the logical structure of their constitutive language (Searle, 2010: 9).
This deontological structure is subjective in its ontological mode of existence: It does not exist in the heads of people in the same way in which a headache exists in the head, but it exists by way of the collective Intentionality of individual persons—in their collective recognition of the status function declarations and the concomitant deontic powers constitutive of social institutions.
With this understanding, the common objection ‘if rights are real then where are they?’[4] is clearly seen as invalid and the result of an ontological misunderstanding: Rights are not ontologically objective physical objects since they have a subjective ontology and exist by way of the collective recognition by persons.
There exists a pervasive systemic fallacy of ambiguity regarding the terms ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ (Searle, 2002: 11, 43): there is a critical distinction between epistemic subjectivity and objectivity and between ontological subjectivity and objectivity (Searle, 2001: 54-56). Social institutions may be ontologically subjective, yet are epistemically objective in the sense in which they are not subject to the personal opinions and preferences of individuals. The fact that a particular piece of paper with ink is legal tender money is absolute in its epistemic objectivity, yet this function is created by way of a collectively recognized status function declaration which imparts the piece of paper with a status above and beyond what is dictated by its physical structure alone (Searle, 2010: 59).[9]
This same epistemic objectivity applies to rights, which permits the creation of an institution of rights that are absolute in their logical structure. It is based on the most fundamental element of human nature, which is human action. From this system of rights emerges negative deontic powers, creating desire-independent reasons for action that serve as a bedrock for the constitutions that establish governments underlying a truly civil society.
[1] An objection which must be blocked is that this is not claiming that man always acts rationally or that his rational capacity is always in control, but instead simply that man is generally rational in the broad sense and is capable of recognizing reasons for action and internalizing them which motivates action, particularly within social institutions.
[2] The ‘psychological gap’ is a phrase used by Searle and is a phenomenological description of the observation that one cannot sit back and passively permit thoughts to cause behavior, but rather that one must act (Searle, 2001: 14-15). This may seem uncontroversial, but Classical Rationality theory claims that thoughts indeed cause behavior.
[5] While not all social institutions are constituted by declarations, all social facts are constituted by declarations (Searle, 2010: 12-13).
[3] Alasdair MacIntyre’s statement shares a similar sentiment: “there are no such [things as natural or human] rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns” (MacIntyre, 1981: 67) and Jeremy Bentham’s critique of rights in Anarchical Fallacies (1843) also demonstrates the same ontological confusion: “That which has no existence cannot be destroyed—that which cannot be destroyed cannot require anything to preserve it from destruction. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, —nonsense upon stilts.” This is not to deny the numerous valid points Bentham raised against the conception of Natural Rights found in the French Revolution, but rather to point out the ontological misunderstanding.
[4] “[…] they are functions that a person or other entity has, not in virtue of physical structure, or at any rate solely in virtue of physical structure, but in virtue of collective imposition and recognition of status. The entity has a certain status, and collective recognition of that status enables the entity to perform the status function.”
Works Cited:
Bentham; Jeremy. (1843) Anarchical Fallacies, vol. 2 of Bowring (ed.), Works.
MacIntyre; Alasdair. (1981) After Virtue. Notre Dame, U.S.A.: University of Notre Dame Press, American edition, ISBN: 0-268-00594-X.
Searle; John R. (2001) Rationality in Action. Cambridge, U.S.A.: The MIT Press, ISBN: 0-262-69282-1.
Searle; John R. (2002) Consciousness and Language. New York, U.S.A.: Cambridge University Press, ISBN: 0-521-59744-7.
Searle; John R. (2010) Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. New York, U.S.A.: Oxford University Press, 1 edition, ISBN: 978-0-19-539617-1.
