Rights and duties

Game theory is very helpful for understanding this process, for a game is merely life written small, in a microcosm. That is why children play. They make a world of smaller scale in imitation of the real one, so that they can practice and learn and grow. And if the games map well onto the real world, they can be very helpful indeed. And the children gain the skills necessary to go out into an ever larger and larger playing field.

The first step in any game is to determine what the goal of the game is, for what purpose the people will play it. That will determine what their duties are, what they must do to play the game. Because the more people that play and the more difficult or complex the purpose (and we delight in pursuing difficult goals and purposes), the more rules will be needed to place limits on what can and cannot be done to accomplish your goals or thwart the goals of others, the more rules to make competition work. Those rules grant players certain rights. You have a right to pursue your goal according to the rules, and if anyone violates those rights, you have a claim upon them. It is a claim with teeth, because it descends from the nature of game and its purposes. If people won’t follow the rules, the game will fall apart.

And of course, you can make games, and even societies, that demand duties but fail to protect the exercise of those duties with attendant rights. They will be terribly unstable, they are unlikely to last for very long. People will get terribly frustrated, because it won’t even be clear how they are meant to play, how they can be expected to win at their part of it if they have no defined path to do so.

Only in a truly solipsistic situation, where we are gods of our own world, do we get the luxury of living without limitations. No rights of others to respect, no rules to follow, no purpose or duty but that which we set for ourselves. Indeed, it is extremely unclear that such a state is even possible, for as much as we might like to imagine it, we are not self-created. Our needs and the goals that we must follow were largely set for us by our nature long before we ever became aware of them.

We must eat, we must breathe, we must labor, we must have clothing and provision, we must have relationships and socialization, we must have care and nurturing and education, we must have touch and affection, we must have that from which we came and that to which we leave behind. All of these make up the terribly complex world of needs and duties and purposes and interactions and conflicts. And we cannot free ourselves from them except by ceasing to be human.

And is that not our concept of a monster? Someone who has left behind what it means to be human. Who wears the shape but not the essence; who has rejected the purposes and the rights, rules, and obligations we have to ourselves and one another. Who transgresses and violates them in ways the destroy and violate the purposes, duties, and rights of others.

When Raskolnikov murders the pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment, he has essentially thought himself out of his humanity. He seeks to shed the burden that we all, as humans, were born with, of purpose, limitations, needs, duties, and the rights that defend them. He rejectes the claim of those rules upon him and murders the pawnbroker in a symbolic act of rejection and self-emancipation and self-creation.

But somehow Raskolnikov found he could not free himself of his humanity. He suffered, he felt guilt, he felt fear. He was not powerful enough to make a world and a self that could operate free from the limitations of his humanity. (And many more powerful men and women have sought to make a world where they can enjoy such luxuries, for the temptation of power is always to slip the bounds of your given nature and make for yourself a kingdom of godhood where only you stand, self-created, with no needs or duties or limits but those you set for yourself. But it is a lonely, solipsistic existence, because by its nature it must make you alone and unique.)

It was with relief that Raskolikov accepted his guilt, because it meant he was able to rejoin humanity. His separation from humanity cut him off from the society and shared purpose of our species, the game of life. A game where only you matter and only you can win, as you will see on any playground, is a game you can only play alone.

The idea of asserting rights apart from responsibilities is quite incoherent, it’s like asserting a tree without a trunk. Purpose is like the roots, the ground that the structure is founded in, from which it draws its place and essence, to reach the sky and sunlight, the goal, above. The trunk and branches are the structure the tree builds to reach that goal, the realization of its duties. The leaves are the space that is defined so it can gather the light and grow, so the trunk can be built, so the goal can be reached. Leaves that have no tree to support them fall to the ground and wither and die, they blow away and are scattered. A tree without leaves, without space to gather the sunlight, will sicken and die. It will fail to grow, the trunk will be stunted, the heart will rot, the roots will weaken. In time it will become just a dead frame of itself, standing without life, its purpose ended.

So we see that there are two possible means to death, two paths that must be avoided. The barren tree and the scattered leaves. A tree is a whole organism. It must have its place, its purpose, it’s structure that reaches toward that ourpose, it must have its space in the sun to grow, to take the sunlight and fulfill its purpose. Cut off any part, separate the parts and expect them to stand alone, and they will start to sicken. Forget why each part exists, what they are for, and the life of the thing will end. The telos, the purpose, is the life, and when it is forgotten, when it is neglected by losing either space or structure, it vanishes. We are left with only the bleached husk of the tree or crumpled leaves blowing in the wind.