[This transcript was generated by AI, so while it’s been checked it over, it may contain small errors.]
REBECCA: Hi, I’m Rebecca Lowe, and welcome to Working Definition, the new philosophy podcast in which I talk with different philosophical guests about different philosophical concepts, with the aim of reaching a rough, accessible, but rigorous working definition.
Today, I’m joined by John Tasioulas. John is a Greek-Australian legal and moral philosopher. He has held various important positions, including Professor of Ethics and Legal Philosophy at Oxford, and Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at UCL. He’s advised the Greek government on AI, and produced two excellent reports for the World Bank on human rights. His paper on mercy is particularly good, I think, as is his Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Law, the front cover of which features an excellent painting by Rouault.
He’s also one of my greatest friends. So I’m delighted he’s here with me today and that we’re going to be talking about one of my favourite things: rights. Thanks for joining me, John.
JOHN: Wonderful to be with you, Rebecca.
REBECCA: So, I want to start with the relation between rights and perfect obligations. I think this is a good place to start. I think it’s somewhere where you and I have a bit of unusual crossover of views. I also think it’s a good route into getting into the question of what a right is, which is the main goal of today. So, do you agree that it’s orthodox to say that perfect obligations are in some sense the content of rights?
JOHN: I think certainly there was a time when this was the orthodox view amongst philosophers from very different schools. So, people like Smith, Kant, Mill, I think, would have agreed that rights relates to that subsection of morality that concerns perfect obligations. So, I think there was that consensus. Whether there is a similar consensus now, either philosophically or in the wider culture, I think is way more doubtful.
REBECCA: Okay, so let’s just clarify a little for our less rights-obsessed friends. There is this standard distinction in philosophy, which I think pretty much generally holds, that perfect obligations are these rights-correlative obligations. These are obligations that are really, really important. There are either no or very few instances in which those obligations shouldn’t be upheld. And then we have what we might think of as imperfect obligations. They’re something more like, they track the good.
So, a standard distinction might be something like, a perfect obligation correlates with the right not to be tortured, whereas, I don’t know, you’re walking along the river and you see a kid in trouble. You think you’ve got an obligation to jump in, but nobody’s going to say if you didn’t do that, that you violated his rights. So, that seems to be some kind of, in some sense, less strong obligation. That kind of obligation is typically referred to as an imperfect obligation.
So, we’re saying something like, rights correlate with these more severe obligations. They’re demands of justice — something like that.
JOHN: Yeah, I’m not sure that I would explicate the distinction in terms of severity. So, I think the extent to which the obligation is stringent, or has great force, I think, can vary from case to case. So, I think one way into this is just to focus on what an obligation is, because I think we’ve lost our focus on that. Very often people think any kind of moral reason is automatically an obligation.
Whereas I want to say that, no, obligations are a subset of moral reasons. And they are reasons that are categorical — they apply to you independently of whether you are motivated in a certain way or not. That they typically exclude certain considerations that you could otherwise act on. If I promise to do something, like attend your conference, then I can’t act on other reasons that I would normally have, such as, it’s nice to stay in bed, so I think I’ll just miss attending your conference. And then there’s the point that you’re making, that they’re not readily overridable. And finally, there’s the point that if you violate these obligations, usually you’re a target for blame — a legitimate target for blame, including self-blame, which we call guilt.
So, once we have this notion of obligation, then we might differentiate between different kinds of obligations. And I think perfect obligations have been understood in different ways — for example, as obligations that can be enforced. Whereas other obligations might not be enforceable — for example, obligations of charity. But I think the salient distinction, for me anyway, in thinking about perfect obligations, is that they are directed obligations. They are owed to specifically someone, and that person is the right-holder with respect to that obligation. So that violating that obligation is in some sense to wrong that person in particular.
So, if I, for example, plagiarised from one of my colleagues, I’m violating their right not to be plagiarised. There is a specific victim there – that particular colleague whose right has been violated. But if I’m generally a kind of uncollegial person, I might be violating a general obligation — an imperfect obligation — of collegiality. But there isn’t anyone in particular who could claim that their duty owed to them has been violated. That’s the kind of distinction.
REBECCA: I like that. I struggle sometimes with this directionality matter. I think if it’s tied together with the victim sense — with the sense of wronging somebody — it makes a lot of sense to me. But I wouldn’t want to say, for instance, that not jumping in the river correlates with a right. I wouldn’t want to say that’s a perfect obligation. But I think if I fail to do that, there is some sense in which I’ve let down that particular kid in the river. There’s a wider sense in which I haven’t acted in line with the good, but I do feel there’s some element of directionality.
So, if what we’re aiming to do is to separate out these kinds of obligations, I worry that maybe the directionality only works in combination with something else.
JOHN: Look, I think you’re on to something there. So, I do think you’ve let down that particular child, even though we might say there wasn’t a right in that child for you to take a risk to save their life. So, that’s certainly true.
But I think the question then is — that obligation that you fail to act on, or that consideration that you fail to act on, could be a general obligation of humanity that is not fully explained by the interests, for example, of that child. Whereas the obligation not to torture that child would be fully explained by the child’s interest, if you see what I mean.
So, in both cases, you’ve let down someone, but the explanation of the norm that you’ve transgressed, in one case, in some sense is fully individualistic. In another case, is not fully individualistic.
REBECCA: I see what you’re saying. I think I’d push back, though, and say the instance of the right, it’s individualistic in that it’s held by an individual, but that individual is an instance of the set of human beings. So, in some sense, it’s still the case that that generality holds.
Then, there‘s going to be a question about how did the obligation or the right arise? And again, you might want to say something like, there’s a distinction because the kid’s the one who’s in the river, the kid got there in the river in certain ways. One of the reasons, maybe, you’re not violating the kid’s right by not jumping in, is because the kid shouldn’t be in the river in the first place — whereas the not-to-torture right doesn’t track anything you’ve particularly done.
But again, I probably just want to say that those are the kinds of distinctions you find both within perfect obligations and imperfect obligations. So again, I’m not sure that that’s going to be sufficient to track that distinction.
JOHN: Well, I think we may have a technical disagreement here. But I would certainly agree with the generality point in this sense, that if I have a particular right, then anyone who has the relevantly similar qualities will also have that right. So, in that sense of generality, of course that must be correct.
REBECCA: Yeah.
JOHN: But that sense of generality doesn’t bring in the idea that the existence of that right depends upon an aggregation of my interest and other right-holders’ interests, if you see what I mean. So, one way to think about this is to say, look, the obligation not to, for example, plagiarise someone has its origins in their interest alone. The obligation of collegiality is more of a common-good kind of obligation. It’s partly a function of the combination of a bunch of people’s interests in having a certain kind of collegial atmosphere.
REBECCA: I mean, I think I could probably push back and say the same about plagiarism, and I could probably say, it’s because you’re an instance of the kind of person doing the kind of job. But I agree — I think this may be either us just cutting very fine lines in slightly different places.
I feel like we’ve broadly got on to something, though, where we’re saying: if we want to get off the ground in thinking what rights are, talking about perfect obligations might be a good starting point. At least, it has been an orthodox starting point.
I sometimes hear people wanting to conflate rights and perfect obligations, though. And I have a problem with this for various reasons. One, I’m quite interested in the idea of being a rights-holder. If I hold the right not to be tortured, that clearly isn’t the same as holding the perfect obligation not to torture. So, I think what I want to get into saying is something like rights generate perfect obligations.
But then, I’m very aware that the more obligation-focused person might say, no, the obligation generates the right. Do you have a view on the, kind of, the arrow there?
JOHN: Yeah, there could be different kinds of arrows —
REBECCA: Yes. [laughter]
JOHN: But I guess what I would say is that having a right is having a certain kind of moral status.
REBECCA: Yes.
JOHN: And the content of that moral status is paradigmatically certain obligations owed to the right-holder. So, the thought might be something like there is something about me — and of course, different theories of rights will differ as to what relevant quality we’re talking about. It could be an interest of mine. It could be the fact that God loves me. It could be some other feature of me. But some feature of me is such that it generates these obligations that are owed to me. And if you violate these obligations, then you have wronged me in particular.
I think that’s how I would think of it. And so you’re right, I think, the perfect obligations are the content of the right, but then not simply to be identified with the right.
REBECCA: Yes, I like that I like that locution, “not to be identified with.” That seems different from — we can come on in a moment to things like what grounds the right, we can talk if we like about things like generating rights. I think there’s a difference.
But if we were to try to just bank a kind of starter working definition, I think we already have a couple of options. One is something like, a right affords a certain kind of moral status. That’s quite loose. Another might be: rights generate perfect obligations. If you had to give a starter at this point — you don’t have to necessarily agree with it — but something that then we can come back to, push against for the rest of the episode. What would be your simple starter?
JOHN: Well, I think given how the conversation has gone so far, perhaps we could say having a right means having a certain kind of moral status, such that it generates obligations on others, that are owed to you. And if they’re not complied with, then there’s a special sense in which you are the victim, or have a grievance in that particular case.
REBECCA: Yeah, I mean, that’s quite wordy, but that sounds pretty good. I think we might have some disagreements at the edges about some of the clauses. But I feel like that’s a good starting point. If we were to simplify it down, we might just say having a right means having a certain moral status that generates particular kinds of obligations that are owed to us, or something like that. That seems like a good starting point.
Another starting point might be to say something like — and this actually also brings us back into this orthodoxy question — within political philosophy over the centuries, there are some leading figures who have pretty much treated justice as the domain of rights. I think it’s fair to say that about Locke. This can tell us certain things. It can tell us certain things that — maybe about the relation of justice and morality, maybe about the fact that rights are some particular element of morality. If we want to say that justice is a subset of morality, it implies that rights are not the same things as other kinds of things within morality.
Is this a useful starting point? Do you think it’s still orthodox to say that people treat justice as the domain of rights?
JOHN: No, I don’t think it’s orthodox, but there’s always been a duality in understanding about justice. So, one conception of justice has always been quite broad, which is as other-regarding morality. Morality, insofar as it relates to how I should treat other people — as opposed to, for example, it being immoral if I don’t take care of my own health, or don’t try to develop my own talents. And then there’s a more narrow, more technical sense of justice, which is a subset of moral concerns relating to others, and that is the rights-based ones.
So, I think that those two locutions have always operated. And that’s why I think Michael Sandel wrote a book called, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? Well, that’s relating to that first locution, probably. But then there are also people who will say, yes, but there was also this other sense of justice, which is a subset of moral concerns, and they’re the rights-based ones.
REBECCA: Yes, this also brings us on to this thorny question about whether ethics and morality are the same thing — the Bernard Williams question.
JOHN: Sure.
REBECCA: Because if you think that morality is the thing that is the other-regarding thing rather than justice and you think ethics includes these questions about the good life, that pushes you towards then seeing justice as a subset of morality.
I quite like this kind of concentric circles approach. [laughter] I like this idea of spending my life mapping out this terrain. Working out how these elements fit within it. That’s the secret goal of these podcasts — just to help Rebecca work out the ontology. [laughter]
Okay. That would be an alternative route in, I think, though, to thinking about what rights are — to think about the world in which they live, something like that.
JOHN: Yeah. But there are, of course, a lot of people who think about justice, and try to do that independently of rights. They focus on notions of equality. So there’s always been that dimension. And certainly, a lot of utilitarians, who tend to be often allergic towards rights but don’t want to have to ditch justice, try to come up with conceptions of justice that are not rights-involving.
REBECCA: Yes. And then, of course, we have another overlapping sense in which some people want to say that justice is the domain of law.
JOHN: That’s right.
REBECCA: And then that brings them on to thinking about legal rights. And then, post-Rawls, this big focus on distributive justice, which, again, pushes us towards the equality idea. So, we then have to do a whole mapping of positions within philosophy and different little groups and gangs.
But let’s think a little more about separating out rights from other, what we might say, elements of morality — if we take a particular place within that anthropology of political philosophers.
So, I sometimes see, for instance, people eliding rights, or conflating rights, with other kinds of things that I think are separate from rights within discussions of morality. So, obvious candidates here would be interests, might be preferences, might be needs. I think quite easily, however — at least within a kind of ordinary language approach — you can think about why that just isn’t going to be satisfactory.
So, it’s easy to think of examples of things that you have a preference for but no right for, at least on an ordinary understanding of a right. So, I might have a preference for daily ice cream. Few people are going to think it’s correct, or indeed a good idea, to start thinking of daily ice cream as a right. And something that’s good for somebody, that they have an interest in, but they have no right to — a satisfying sex life. If they have a right to that, that puts pretty hefty obligations on other people that we probably don’t think obtain, unless you’re one of those quite niche, crazy philosophers. Then there are things that you might not have a preference for, but you do have a right to, like carrying out some act of violent self-defense. And there are things you do have a right to, but wouldn’t be good for you — behaving in an unnecessary objectionable manner.
This just kind of language-based approach shows us, I think, that there are distinctions between these kinds of elements of morality.
JOHN: Yeah. I think that’s right. I mean we’ve already talked about rights as involving perfect obligations. But that implies there are imperfect obligations like, for example, certain forms of kindness or generosity or consideration or compassion for others that wouldn’t necessarily be rights-involving.
There are also ideals — moral ideals people have of service or of courage that go way beyond anything that could be demanded of them, even as a matter of obligation, i.e. they wouldn’t be in any way acting wrongfully or subject to blame if they forwent these ideals and weren’t able to fulfill them. And as you say, you can’t go simply from interests to rights, or from preferences to rights.
Certainly, some rights seem to me to be grounded in interests. But they’re not to be identified with those interests because you always have to raise the question — I may have a very strong interest in all the best philosophers in the world giving me feedback on my work. That would really enhance the quality of my work. But they don’t have an obligation to do that, because it’s simply not feasible. It would be unduly burdensome for them to do that.
And again, with preferences, the mere fact that I have a preference doesn’t generate a right or is not to be equated with a right. Although it may be the case that there are some rights — for example, the right to choose what occupation you will have — that are responsive to your preferences. But that requires a further step. The mere fact that there’s a preference is not going to be enough.
REBECCA: Yeah, I mean, this seems right to me — it seems important that we have terms to pick out these concepts, when they quite clearly are different concepts.
JOHN: Yes.
REBECCA: At least in the way in which they operate in our ordinary everyday lives, and our language, and have done for centuries.
It also seems to me some of these, conflating rights with preferences or interests — like you said, identifying as opposed to grounding — we should come on to grounding in a moment. It seems like you also then just get into a world of competition, in which, well, why is your interest stronger than mine? Oh, wait a second, I have four interests in doing this thing, and you only have one right!
But that seems pretty risky because — I mean, this is the great Joseph Raz example about if people like ice cream enough, then there’s enough ice-cream-eating that means that that should happen, and somebody’s rights should be violated in order to ensure the ice cream happens.
JOHN: Right.
REBECCA: You know, this kind of aggregation account, which, if you think that rights are just even some special kind of interest, you are at serious risk of doing something— not only being permitted, but being required to do something — really horrible. Just because there’s enough people, or people want something enough.
JOHN: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s definitely a problem. I mean, I’d say there’s an even more basic problem, and it goes back to your initial question about rights and perfect obligations. That the reason I’m reluctant to say that is now orthodoxy is that people are cutting the tie between rights and obligations.
And they’re doing that just by basically saying that an important interest — or pretty much any interest worth noting — constitutes a right. And we see this especially in the legal context with proportionality doctrine that says, well, okay that person enjoys feeding pigeons in the park, therefore, they have a right to feed pigeons in the park. But once you go down that route, of course, then rights massively multiply. And then you’re in a process where you have to trade off rights against each other, which starts to look like this dangerous utilitarian process that you’re hinting at.
And the idea that rights afford us real protections and that they’re overridden — if at all permissibly — only in extremis, goes out the window. So, it looks like you’re really respecting rights because you’re willing to find rights all over the place. But in fact, the very proliferation of rights — because you’ve identified them with interests — now loses the distinctive moral role that rights were performing.
REBECCA: This seems to me even more risky if we identify them with preferences. Because if at least we take a conception of interest on which it’s something that’s good for you — objectively good for you — I get that not everybody takes that conception of interest. But preference — I mean, you might have a preference to do something horrible. Once you start identifying rights with preferences, you’re going to get into pretty nasty ground.
JOHN: And I think a lot of the people who talk about interests really are talking about preferences.
REBECCA: I think that’s right.
JOHN: And part of the point there is to say, well, who am I to judge what objectively makes someone’s life go well? If they decided this is the thing that they want to do — feed pigeons in the park or whatever—then they have a right to that. That’s something I’ve got to take into account. But now I’ve got to factor in other people’s interests, rights.
And I think really the whole notion of rights goes out the window. I wrote a piece once where I’m quoting one of the leading writers on this proportionality theory of rights. And he very candidly says, well, you don’t have very much in virtue of having a right. And, of course, that follows from the analysis because it’s just any old interest, including one that’s purely based on a preference, is going to be counted as a right. Then, of course, it doesn’t mean much because it might be very easily traded off by other people’s so-called interests or rights.
REBECCA: You have this deep irony — which isn’t really even irony if you’re smart enough to see the logic — which is, people claim to be caring about these things, therefore we need more of these things. But by there being more of these things, their value decreases. I mean it’s kind of basic maths. [laughter]
JOHN: You kill the thing you love, that’s right.
REBECCA: Let’s — before we get on to the grounding question — I’m keen to get on to grounding and moral theory. Let’s just think a little about what our discussion might tell us about the kind of thing a right is.
So, we’ve thought about its relation to other elements of morality. We’ve thought about what its content might be, or what it generates. I’m quite interested when I think about these concepts in thinking about things like, is something a state of affairs? Is something a power? Is something a condition? Is something… And there are some obvious examples of kinds of things that people say that rights are.
So one thing we’ve talked about is interests. Sometimes people think about them as capacities. Sometimes people think of them as demands. All of these ideas, I think, can be considered in terms of whether there’s something to do with you — whether they’re a part of you. A capacity is a part of you. They might be something that’s afforded to you. They might be just something that tracks in the world that relates to you. Like something outside of you, like a demand of justice — it’s not really something that you hold. That seems to me a little odd in itself, if we want to be able to talk about rights-holders or rights-bearers. Do you have anything to say about —
Powers, I feel, is a good contender here. Is a right a power?
JOHN: Yeah. Well, these things go back to sort of medieval discussions, and there was that distinction between subjective and objective right. And I think subjective right was meant to capture this idea that you’re getting at — that somehow rights discourse relates to a particular subject, a particular person, an individual who has these rights.
So, that’s why I sort of tried to anticipate this sort of question, by talking about a moral status — a moral status that has as its content these directed or perfect obligations that we talked about earlier.
REBECCA: Yes, so we should say this is a kind of unusual use of objective/subjective, in the sense that it doesn’t track that standard sense in which we talk about in philosophy. It’s more like a shift from something like natural restraints on power to people having powers to exercise for themselves. Or something that has the subject as the — it has as some kind of particular subject. This also probably tracks a shift in religious belief. There was some idea that if you were — even if you had the concept of wronging somebody, you were wronging God. There’s some kind of intermediary in there.
JOHN: Yes. Although that’s a tricky one because there are some rights theorists who will say that ultimately the reason we have these rights is because, for example, we’re loved by God. So, if you really dig down deep —
REBECCA: Yes. I thought about that when you said that earlier in your list. Because if you have the right —
JOHN: That’s right. And a similar problem is going to arise with the utilitarian account of rights. There won’t really be an individualistic characteristic. But for me, I think that probably — rather than saying this is a bad analysis of rights — indicates why utilitarians always have [laughter] problems with rights.
REBECCA: [laughter] I think that’s right. If rights are just part of some calculus, if you’ve instrumentalised them. If there’s something you’re being — this concept you’re being parasitic on, in some sense — in order to do your calculations. And they’re things that can be traded off against each other. Then, it’s pretty hard to have that cohere with the idea that they are something for some particular person. That John has rights, and Rebecca has rights. If they need to be zjummed together in some big calculus in the sky, it’s pretty hard to keep — I mean, we just come on to the classic separateness of persons argument, which Rawls and Nozick —
JOHN: Yeah, I don’t think it’s so much the calculus, because this problem is also a problem for the more theocentric account of rights. A theocentric person need not be doing a calculus. But what they’re saying is, yes, but ultimately the reason you have this right is something to do with not you, but the fact that you have a certain relationship to this further entity, which is God.
And I think the utilitarian then brings the additional problem that the thing that they’ve identified is going to be the sort of thing that involves the kind of calculus that makes us think, well, this is not the kind of protection, the robust protection, we think that rights genuinely afford us.
REBECCA: I think that’s right. I think both of these accounts just aren’t going to be sufficiently individualistic, in one sense or another, to track this idea of the right. You put it nicely when you said something like, generating these obligations that are owed to you. This specificity, whether then it’s you as an instance of a bigger set of people, and this comes on to this, I like to sometimes make this, distinction between general rights and particular rights. General rights, in the sense of a right that all people hold. A particular right, you know, I have a particular right to this mug of water because I bought the mug at the museum. Whereas we all have the right not to be tortured. I feel like this is quite a useful distinction.
But let’s just talk a little about grounding. This has come up a few times. You made a nice distinction between the idea of identifying a right with an interest, and the idea of rights being grounded in interests. I think I’m certainly open to quite a pluralistic approach to grounding rights. I don’t think, necessarily, the same thing has to ground all rights, partly because I do have this belief in these general and particular rights. I think there are other distinctions that are important between rights: the kinds of rights that hold in all places and time just because you’re a human; the kinds of rights that you acquire along the way; distinctions between moral and legal rights.
But what does it mean to ground a right? When I say this, when we have this conversation, what are you thinking I’m talking about?
JOHN: I think there are many things one could be talking about. But I think the most fundamental is a kind of ontological point about explaining the existence of the right. So, what is the case for saying, there is a right not to be tortured, but there isn’t a right, for example, to have feedback on my work from all the best philosophers? What makes it the case that one exists and one does not? How would you go about establishing that?
REBECCA: That makes sense to me. I —
JOHN: And we know philosophers have massively divergent views about this. Some people think that interests of the right-holder play a key role, and they say, that’s why typically rights are things that benefit us. Others say, no, no, look, we also have rights that in no way benefit us, like the right to access pornography, perhaps, but we still have that right, so there must be something else, a status of ours.
And even amongst those who talk about interests, there’ll be some who say, it’s not any interest. So, my great mentor, Jim Griffin, wrote an important book about human rights where he thought that autonomy and liberty are the only interests that can justify the existence of rights. But then you get into big problems about, well, what about those humans who have no real capacity for autonomous decision-making? Like a newly born child, does that not have a right not to be tortured? So obviously there’s huge contestation there.
And then there are, of course, the more theocentric views that we’ve talked about that say it’s neither really about your interests, nor about a status that can be articulated in terms of naturalistic terms. It’s rather some kind of relationship you bear to God. Either you’re made in the image of God or, for example, God loves you, loves human beings, and therefore, human beings have a special status in virtue of that love.
REBECCA: Yeah, I think I agree with most of that. I’d probably want to make a distinction between the kinds of explanations that justify, and those that don’t. I feel like when we talk here about grounding, we’re talking in some sense about what justifies something.
JOHN: Sure.
REBECCA: I also, I like to make this quite niche distinction — particularly when I think about Lockean property rights — between what means that someone is justified in holding a right, having acquired a right, and why is somebody justified in holding that right at all. You want to say, why did Rebecca acquire the right to have the apple on the tree, when John could have also? Because either of us could be justified in holding it. But I want to separate out the fact that I’m justified in holding it, from how I acquired it — or how I generated it, as we talked about it earlier.
But yeah, this seems to make sense to me. I feel like when we talk about grounding rights, we’re explaining why they exist. We’re justifying their existence in some sense, or asking what provides their justification.
JOHN: Yeah.
REBECCA: You mentioned God. We talked about interests. I think I’m happy to say that need probably pretty much sufficiently grounds some rights. I think there’s a question about the human good more broadly. About reason. I think it’s fair to say some people think that reason can do a lot of work in justifying some rights.
Again, when I think about these matters, I’m broadly pluralistic, in a bounded sense. I don’t mean that anything can ground a right. But I think that different —
JOHN: I just want to say I share your pluralism. And I think one of the reasons people are worried about pluralism is that they think that if a diversity of kinds of interests, for example, and considerations can generate rights, then they worry that that means that you’re just going to proliferate rights endlessly. But the answer to that is to say, the fact that the input into the argument for the existence of a right could include a very diverse range of factors, doesn’t mean that automatically you have a right.
So, for example, in the case of need, someone may have an incredibly rare disease, and they would need a certain kind of therapy in order for them to save their lives. It doesn’t follow from that, that if creating this therapy was going to cost astronomical sums, that they would have a right that society spend astronomical sums, in order to cure this disease that only they have. So, the need is very urgent there — it’s life-threatening. But you can’t automatically go to the issue of rights because you need to go via the notion of obligation, and that brings in feasibility constraints.
So, once you understand the importance of obligation, you can be more relaxed about the kind of input into what justifies the existence of a right in the first place.
REBECCA: I think that’s absolutely right. I think you have to be careful. Again, I mean, you touched on urgency also. Urgency can indeed play some role in determining what rights are, or when they’re generated. But just because something’s urgent, again, doesn’t make it a matter of rights. Because indeed, some of the obligations that might impose upon people might be too burdensome. It might just be infeasible.
If you think everyone has a right to eat whatever they want, but everybody wants to eat some particular cow, and there’s only one cow like that in the world [laughter] — I mean, that’s a silly philosopher’s example. But quite quickly, we can see that we want to be making distinctions between the kinds of rights we’re talking about.
We want to be able to ensure that rights are — I mean, the great Kantian doctrine of ‘ought implies can’ I often come back to, when thinking about these matters. I feel like that’s the sensible Kantian doctrine [laughter]. I’m not so sure about the other ones.
JOHN: I think that is a very powerful point, that ought implies can. In particular, obligations imply feasibility. And that if it’s genuinely an obligation that someone is going to be blamable for not complying with, then you have to factor in the question, what is the burden on them in complying with them, and is that a reasonable burden?
And that’s why, as I was saying to you, the tendency now — especially amongst a certain kind of legal thinking in human rights, for example — where you simply identify the right with the interest, and then say, well, I have a right to everything that will cater to that interest.
And my favourite example of this is the UN special rapporteur on the right to health, who has to go around to different countries to see if they’re complying with the right to health. And in one case, he told the story about going to Sweden, and the Swedes were very smug, because they thought, well, of course, we comply with the right to health. [laughter] But he was able to find a group in Sweden that was sort of living in a far-flung area, where they had poor television reception. And he said, “Aha! so their right to health is not being adequately complied with, because if you have poor television reception, you might not get important information that’s relevant to your right.” [laughter]
Now, of course, they’re simply operating with the right to health as one’s interest in health. But if you think of one’s interest in health, well, virtually the whole of the budget could be spent — government’s budget — on furthering that interest. But that’s not what the right to health demands. The right to health demands only to the extent to which there’s an obligation to do that, and there you’ve got to factor in other priorities as well.
REBECCA: That’s right. I mean, this also just seems like it’s expansionist both at the level of the right, and of the concept of health.
JOHN: Oh, yes. Well, I mean, the WHO also operates with an incredibly expanded concept of health. [laughter]
REBECCA: What a surprise! An organisation with the word ‘health’ in it wants to see everything as a matter of health —[laughter]
JOHN: As a matter of health. But I think that is a deformation that everyone is subject to. You know, lawyers want to say that rights are fundamentally legal entities, or reasons for creating laws. I’m afraid we all suffer from this kind of deformation, depending upon what our specialism is.
REBECCA: So, coming back just briefly to this point about obligations implying feasibility, one thing I enjoy thinking about is this idea of conflict within elements of morality. So, obviously a lot of philosophers have talked about value conflict. Some people want to say values just can’t conflict metaphysically. Other people say they can, it’s just about working out what the tradeoffs are — people on the other side of things.
I tend to just take quite a metaphysical approach to doing political philosophy. And I just think that in terms of rights and obligations, that stuff should be able to be sorted at the metaphysical level. If we think that there’s an instance in which you have competing obligations, I think you just haven’t understood what the content of your obligations is. Because I don’t think you can hold — one person can hold — competing obligations. Somebody might just say, well, maybe you’re being overly strict about what an obligation is — maybe you want to say you just want to reserve that for perfect obligations. Either way, though, I feel like it seems to me like there should be some kind of ontological solution to this kind of problem.
JOHN: I think I would sort of agree with that, but not the whole way, I think.
REBECCA: Yeah, you’re just going to say, Rebecca’s doing too much metaphysics —
JOHN: No, it’s not that you’re doing too much metaphysics. [laughter] But I think that you’re making things maybe too easy in saying there can never be a conflict of obligations. So, I’ve already criticised those lawyers who proliferate rights, and say any time you find an interest there’s a right, and therefore they’re generating supposed conflicts of obligations. I think that doesn’t make sense. If an obligation exists, it’s got to be the sort of thing that is not readily overridable. But you seem to be heading in the direction of saying it’s never overridable.
REBECCA: I did qualify slightly when I said it, because I realised that you were going to object in this way. [laughter] It would be right — not just because it’s you, although I thought you would because you’re smart — but I think I realised I objected with myself. But I think certainly in terms of these perfect obligations, because I don’t believe in rights conflict, for instance, therefore I think I can’t believe in perfect obligation conflict.
I think oftentimes when people talk about even imperfect obligations conflicting, I’m not really sure I want to think that it’s those constituent parts of morality that are conflicting. I think it’s to do with working out what the reasons are, working out — there’s more than one right answer in many instances. So, it’s weighing things up.
JOHN: I think there is often a kind of lazy pluralism, sometimes encouraged by certain readings of Isaiah Berlin, that is too ready to find conflicts.
REBECCA: I was thinking of that.
JOHN: You need to think through the content of those particular obligations or concerns. So, one of my favourite examples is, again, Griffin giving the example of someone who has committed murder, has been subject to a fair trial, and has been sentenced to imprisonment for murder. Is there a conflict between that demand of justice that he go to prison, and his right to be free?
And he says, yes, there is a conflict, but the demand of justice overrides his right to liberty. Whereas I’d want to say, your right to liberty — the scope of that is determined by the obligations that it generates. And those obligations do not include an obligation to allow you to be at liberty even though you’ve committed a crime.
But there will be some cases, I think, where we’re going to say, well, there was an obligation, but there was a competing obligation. I mean, the classic one, of course, is Sartre’s example of the young man who’s got the competing obligation. Does he join the resistance and fulfill his patriotic obligation, or does he look after his aged mother, his obligation to his mother? I think there are such situations that arise, for sure.
But also, your further point—that that doesn’t mean that because there’s this conflict, anything counts, or we can just go one way or the other. There may be more or less intelligent ways of trying to respond to both of those demands.
REBECCA: Yeah, I think there’s some just very sophomoric, simple sense in which you can’t be obligated to do competing things. Therefore, you have to work out which obligations hold. Which obligations, if they are — I don’t really like the term — overridable. But I tend to think of this stuff more in terms of conditionality. I think this certainly when people talk about rights being overridden.
So, to use your nice example of the right to be free, but, justified imprisonment. I have hardcore views on whether imprisonment can ever be justified. I think in some instances, on defensive grounds it can, for instance. Therefore, do I think the right to be free has been overridden? In those instances, I just think the right to be free doesn’t hold, because I do think it’s conditional. Which I think is what you were getting at when you were saying — when you gave that example.
JOHN: But then you have the case of, you know, will you torture a person in order to find out where the terrorists are who are about to bomb Manhattan? The question there is — it does seem to me that it would be a rights violation to do it, but it might still be an open question whether that is, all things considered, permissible.
REBECCA: I think for me this is the hardest question about rights, because my instinct is to be hardcore and say, you just let the world explode. Or at least that the right thing to do would be to let the world explode. Because it’s never right to torture somebody. That seems to leave me in a pretty difficult position.
JOHN: No, but the person who’s making the point is conceding that it’s not right, in the sense that you are blamable, you have done something wrong. But that this wrong thing was nonetheless, all things considered, permissible. But it might still mean that you ought to feel guilty about that, you ought to compensate that person, or do certain things that wouldn’t apply in the previous case we talked about, which is putting the convicted murderer in prison.
REBECCA: I just worry that this is going to unravel all the work we’ve done, if it can be the case it’s sometimes permissible to do something —
JOHN: No, see, I think this is not the case. I think very often people want to put forward a kind of utilitarian analysis by saying, ah but aren’t there going to be conflicts? And doesn’t that mean that ultimately you’re a kind of utilitarian if you admit that rights get overridden? But the answer to that is, they don’t get overridden at the point at which the utilitarian says they get overridden, which is the point at which they maximise utility. They get overridden way down the track from that.
REBECCA: Yeah, but this still seems like cheating to me, Johnny, because it’s not just utility that I don’t think should be a ground for trading away stuff. I just don’t think rights are the kinds of things — if we want them to have this bite. So, one reason I think utilitarians aren’t good liberals is because they don’t have access to this really demanding notion of rights, as in giving this kind of ultimate biting force. Because if everything is always a matter of tradeoffs, you’re just left with — there’s always going to be something more competing.
JOHN: Well, look, I can give you what you want very easily, by specifying rights in a certain way.
REBECCA: Which is what I’m trying to do with the conditionality thing, but then —
JOHN: Sure, but there is an absolute right not to torture people for fun. So, that right can never be overridden. There is no case in which you’d be justified, all things considered, in transgressing that right. So, the question to you then would be, you know, a lot of people are going to feel uncomfortable with the thought that rights will only have bite if you let Manhattan be destroyed, rather than twist someone’s arm to find out where the bomb is being launched from. So, what are you going to do in that case?
Are you going to say, no, no, no, yes, let Manhattan be bombed. Or are you going to say, I’m going to avoid the conflict by saying his right to torture incorporates within it an exception, which is if Manhattan’s going to be bombed, then actually he doesn’t have a right to it. Which path would you go down?
REBECCA: This is a very particularist approach! I feel like I haven’t yet quite solved this problem for myself. But I feel like the conditional approach, which is sort of what you’re saying, but I don’t want to bake in — I don’t want to have to bake in a particular — I don’t want to bake in some list of exclusions. And I certainly don’t want to go down the emergency route.
Nozick has this famous footnote about catastrophic moral horror, in which, in fact I wrote it down, he says, “The question of whether these side constraints are absolute” — he basically means perfect moral obligations by this — “or whether they may be violated in order to avoid catastrophic moral horror, and if the latter, what the resulting structure might look like, is one I hope largely to avoid.” [laughter]
JOHN: I think we can see why! [laughter]
REBECCA: This is classic Nozick — I’m not gonna tell you the really important stuff!
JOHN: Yeah.
REBECCA: But I have various problems with this ‘catastrophic moral horror’ thing. One niche problem I have with it is, isn’t Nozick supposed to think that all instances of rights violation are catastrophic moral horror? Yet I think we’re supposed to imagine it’s some great big, the world is gonna explode. So, is this like Nozick the aggregationist, here? It only can count as catastrophic moral horror if the whole world explodes, or Manhattan explodes? Don’t we want to say that torturing a baby is catastrophic moral horror?
JOHN: Oh, absolutely.
REBECCA: Therefore, isn’t this a serious problem for all of these matters? I don’t have a good answer, but I feel like the conditionality approach helps a lot, more generally, with what might seem to be rights conflicts.
JOHN: I agree with that. I think rights do —
REBECCA: Of course people like Amartya Sen have tried to bring in hierarchical things — the goal-rights solution. I feel that’s just smuggling in consequentialism.
JOHN: Sure.
REBECCA: I don’t think hierarchy is the answer here.
JOHN: Yeah. I mean, what did Tim Scanlon say? That interests are overridden and rights are redefined. I think that is a good starting point for thinking about these things. That your first port of call when it comes to rights is to think about what the actual content of the right is, and it may incorporate conditions which obviate the thought that there is a conflict in that case.
But I guess my claim against you would be that you’re still having a lot of bite, even in the case where a right can be overridden. Provided that it’s not like a habitual feature of practical reason that these rights are overridden. But I understand the temptation to say they’re absolute.
But then another thing one might think about there, is whether the absolutist conception really finds it’s more natural home in a more theological, or theocentric, account of rights. That basically says, no, no, no, your role in this world is to obey these absolute demands, and of course, there is another world where you’ll be rewarded for doing so.
REBECCA: So, one thing though we should clarify — and I know that we’re going to agree on this — is that you could hold that some rights are absolute, but of course not hold that all rights are absolute.
JOHN: Correct.
REBECCA: There’s a bad reading oftentimes when, you know, we people who are interested in rights start talking this way, and then they think, oh but, and then they come up with some instance of a right which clearly isn’t absolute.
I think this actually can bring us quite neatly into something I think we should discuss, which is different kinds of rights. And by that I don’t mean, let’s list some rights. I mean some distinctions between things like — so we mentioned natural rights earlier. My view is that natural rights are a subset of moral rights, so they’re not legal rights. They are — I think I’m quite happy to say that natural rights are the old-fashioned way of referring to human rights. I know that not everybody agrees with that.
But if this is something like a set of rights that all human beings hold in all places and times in virtue of their humanity — in virtue of being a member of the set of human beings, something like that — then quite clearly the legal right to get your driving license from the DMV [laughter] isn’t a natural right. It’s also not a moral right. So, if the distinction between moral rights and legal rights is moral rights reflect truths about morality, and legal rights are posited, conferred by positive law — we’re already starting to make distinctions between the set of things that are rights.
Are there other useful distinctions, do you think, within these — I mean, these kind of general, big-cut kinds of distinctions — within the broad set of things that count as rights?
JOHN: Well, I just want to go back a bit to natural rights. So I think natural rights is an important concept. But it’s important, I think, to distinguish at least two things it can mean. One is that they’re rights that you could have even in a state of nature, even in a pre-political environment. And that fits in with your point about that they’re rights that humans have throughout human history at any particular stage. So, they’re kind of timeless because they simply come along with your humanity.
And then on the other hand, natural rights could mean also, or instead, rights that are discoverable through natural reason — through ordinary moral reasoning, rather than by looking into law books, or looking at revelation, et cetera. And I think it’s important to keep those two things distinct. If we think of natural rights as rights you have in a state of nature — pre-political rights — then it looks to me that’s going to be a pretty meager set of rights.
REBECCA: I also think that you probably want to say that some of the rights you hold in the state of nature, you don’t hold in political society.
JOHN: Oh!
REBECCA: So, I think there’s a distinction between state-of-nature rights and natural rights.
JOHN: Okay, well, that’s very interesting, because —
REBECCA: So, if you take Locke, for instance. He thinks you have the right to punish in the state of nature, but he thinks that then you kind of — he says “forfeit”, I don’t like that — give that up to collectively work out matters of justice together. But also, there might just be — I’m sure you can think of some other thing that just doesn’t obtain. So, as soon as you get access to political justice — to things like a fair trial—then whatever way you’re supposed to morally determine those matters in the state of nature just don’t hold anymore.
JOHN: Yeah, that’s an interesting point, but — so, maybe there isn’t this straightforward move from ‘I have them in a state of nature’ to ‘I have them timelessly’. Although, he does, as you say, talk about forfeit. So in a sense, you’ve chosen to give them up, in some sense, in transitioning to civil society. But nonetheless, the point still holds, I think, that one is a conception of rights as the conditions under which one holds them, and they include these pre-political conditions. The other is about the methodology through which one discovers them.
REBECCA: Yes.
JOHN: Which is through ordinary reasoning. And I’ve had the view that natural rights in the second sense — discoverable by reason — are fundamentally what human rights are. And that’s how we should understand human rights law, as an attempt to legalise, insofar as is appropriate, background natural rights. Rights discoverable by reason as inhering in all human beings simply in virtue of their humanity.
But responsive to the fact that the rights we have in virtue of our humanity can change, as technological and other capacities alter over time. So I wouldn‘t want to say that the caveman has a right to in vitro fertilisation in order to procreate, but— or a right to internet access — but people today might have those rights.
REBECCA: I like to have this little space in my conception of rights for potential rights. So this is something like, rights that potentially hold for all humans in all places and times, but are conditional on there being certain access to certain things. So, if the cavemen — suddenly someone came along, and worked out about trials, and gave them that, then they’d have that right to a trial. It’s not because they’re cavemen living in that time that they don’t have the right to the trial. It’s just because — we come also back on to your nice point about feasibility here.
If suddenly there was some awful famine and food was very scarce, that might well change at least the scope and the content of some of our rights. Not because reasoning determined things differently, or was able to pick out things differently, or we were different kinds of things, or we had different needs. So, I think this potentiality thing — again, it’s metaphysical — it allows us to say that these are truths that obtain, but it has space for the feasibility complication.
JOHN: I guess I would strike a rare pragmatic note here, and say that these potentiality rights, they are potentially infinite, given the different sorts of circumstances that might crop up. Some of those circumstances are incredibly remote, like there’s no way the internet’s going to be invented during the lifetime of the caveman that we’re talking about. There’s no way that they’re going to have a right to a nationality, because suddenly the state has emerged in their environment.
So, they wouldn’t really be playing much of a practical role. So, there’d have to be some other kind of motivation for acknowledging them, over and above the fact that we’re interested in the moral reasons we may genuinely have cause to comply with.
REBECCA: I think I’m probably just going to come down on something like, we have these core capacities as the kind of creatures that we are. These tell us things about our needs. They tell us things about our interests. I feel, again, we can separate some of this stuff out at a different level.
But I just quickly want to get on to a couple of questions, to finish, about the kind of role of rights in the world. Can you have liberalism without a strong rights culture? What about democracy?
JOHN: Well, liberalism, I think, is a hard one. My understanding of liberalism is that it fundamentally prioritises, or gives great weight, to liberty as a political value. And that it has a certain kind of individualism at its core, that each individual matters, and they matter equally at some deep level.
There are clearly people in the liberal tradition who are of a utilitarian bent, who would not see rights as playing a fundamental role. They have much more of a downstream role. But I think Rawls was right that there is an important need within the individualistic characterisation of liberalism to capture the distinctive value of each person. And I think a very important way of cashing that out is through the notion of a right. And not simply a right that exists because it maximises utility or performs some other sort of aggregative social function but respects the status and interests of the right-holder. So, I can’t see really that liberalism can be a compelling doctrine without having a pretty central place for rights.
As for democracy — I think, I’m one of those people convinced by one of your previous guests, Josh Ober, that democracy is extremely important, but it’s not mere majoritarianism. That it is a form of collective self-government that necessarily involves a certain kind of schedule of rights. In particular, rights to various kinds of political participation. And also rights, I suspect, to certain kinds of socioeconomic provision, because I can’t really participate in democratic deliberation and decision-making, if I’m starving or worried about where my next meal is going to come from.
So I think there is a sort of almost definitional aspect to democracy that it must incorporate certain rights. But then there’s also the empirical point — people like Kathryn Sikkink and other important social scientists have argued — that the best way to fulfill rights generally is through a democratic system of government.
REBECCA: Yeah, I think one thing I’d say is, to me, there’s a very interesting question about what are the rights — you put it nicely, you said democracy must incorporate certain rights. That makes a lot of sense to me. I think there’s a separate matter, though, about the conditions that need to obtain for democracy to get off the ground. And I feel like respect for certain rights might be in that bucket, rather than within the definitional content of democracy.
And on the point around the central place of rights within liberalism. Yeah, I mean maybe I’m just being again a pragmatist, I don’t really want to rule out a load of those utilitarian liberals from within —
JOHN: Oh, no. That’s right.
REBECCA: I agree with you on that. I think liberalism is a family of theories, and I do think that there are some non-rights-focused theories. I just think that they have a much harder job in protecting that central thing, which is individual liberty or, indeed, other kinds of liberty.
JOHN: Yes.
REBECCA: I like your point about Rawls. It made me think — I read a book a while back, where somebody made this hilarious claim at the beginning, which was something like, “There has been much great thinking about rights over the history of mankind. But for about 200 years, nobody thought about rights until Robert Nozick came along!” And I was like, you do realise Nozick was writing in response to Rawls!? [laughter] And what is Rawls’ first principle — right? We need to have equal access to these basic goods — including what? Including rights!
Rawls is a really, really important rights thinker. I think people forget this. They jump straight on to the difference principle, and they forget that you don’t even get on to that unless you’ve already met the conditions of the previous two principles.
JOHN: Well, you know, that’s right. And I think we forget how dominant utilitarianism was, in political philosophy, prior to Rawls.
REBECCA: Totally.
JOHN: You know, there was sort of taken for granted utilitarianism. Or alternatively, there were other traditions, like the Catholic tradition, which didn’t necessarily also accord a very important role to rights.
REBECCA: And intuitionism, which is just very hard to know what it even is.
JOHN: Well, okay, we may have differences —
REBECCA: Unless you read W. D. Ross. He’s great.
JOHN: W. D. Ross is who I think about. [laughter] Yeah, I think he is great.
REBECCA: [laughter] He’s fine, but more broadly.
JOHN: Yeah, no, Ross is great. But I think there is this — when I wrote a commentary on the chapter in The Concept of Law, by Herbert Hart, that’s on justice and morality, Hart never mentions rights, really, as what the core of justice is. He sometimes comes close to it, talks about entitlements, etc. Then, of course, by the 1970s, he has this beautiful essay, Between Utility and Rights.
But all of that is really sparked by people like Rawls, and then others like Dworkin who follow in his wake, Nozick, etc. So, you know, Rawls’s achievement here is pretty spectacular, in that respect.
REBECCA: I love the Hart ‘is there only one natural right?’ essay. I know he went back on that.
JOHN: He repudiated it.
REBECCA: [laughter] He suddenly got into rights.
All right, so one final question. How come there are so many great Australian philosophers?
JOHN: Yes.
REBECCA: David Armstrong, J.J.C. Smart. Even today, probably the most influential philosopher in the world is Peter Singer. I don’t like his work, but I think he’s a important philosopher. I think he’s a good writer. It’s a small place with not that many people. You’ve had to bring people over from other places. What is it about Australia that — certainly in the 20th century — very, very good at doing philosophy?
JOHN: That’s right. Some people think philosopher and Australian are a contradiction in terms. [laughter] But in fact, you’re right. There is a very strong philosophical representation of Australians. And you’ve only mentioned some of them. John Finnis —
REBECCA: Yup.
JOHN: And, you know, Alan Donagan — there’s very serious people that have come out of Australia.
I haven’t really given this much thought, but one thing I would say is, as Aristotle says, in order to do philosophy, you need leisure. In order to have the leisure, you need wealth. Australia is a wealthy society. There was one point in, I think, the 19th century, Melbourne was the richest city in the world. So there are these material preconditions that people are able to engage in this kind of speculation — take a wider view — because they live in a wealthy society that affords them the leisure to do so.
But I think also there’s another aspect, which is of being on the other side of the planet from the countries that you look to as having the philosophical tradition. So maybe that spurs a kind of need to reappropriate those in your own terms, and try to engage with those fundamentals. Because you’re sort of, as it were, transplanting a culture to an entirely new environment. And that means you can’t, in the same way, take things for granted, as those who are actually living in those countries do.
I’m not sure, but I think that immigrant aspect of Australia —
REBECCA: Yes, I was going to say, I think there’s also a pluralism, a beneficial pluralism, that derives from immigration. Australia is an immigration nation. You see the same thing in America. Natural resources, not just — we can look into the history of wealth in Australia — but just things like good weather, great food.
JOHN: That’s right. And then we get to another issue, which is whether weather influences the content of one’s philosophical view. [laughter] So I remember Michael Devitt, another Australian philosopher, saying that Australians are realists, just like the ancient Greeks, because they’re in very sunny countries. Whereas in misty northern European countries, there’s a much bigger uptake of idealism. So that’s another question worth exploring. [laughter]
REBECCA: Well, to finish, I want to get back on to this point that we started about rights and perfect obligations, and decide whether that’s where we want to define it. But I would say another thing you and I agree on is great Australian wine. I should do a whole episode on the philosophical value of wine. And maybe some of these great philosophers benefited from some of those great Victorian wines.
But let’s finish with this point around perfect obligations. No, I see you want to say something about Australian wine!
JOHN: No, no, no, I think that’s a brilliant thought, actually! [laughter] Yes, I think that is another precondition, along with wealth, for excellent philosophy.
REBECCA: Aristotle, you know, had those great grapes from Naoussa, after all.
JOHN: That’s right. And I think he refers to one grape variety, Limnio, which still exists.
REBECCA: Yes, that’s right.
JOHN: That’s quite remarkable.
REBECCA: All right. So, you’re in the Australian wine bar, and someone says, “Hey, that’s that Tasioulas guy! I hear he writes about rights.” Now he’s already had a little bit of the wine. He’s not a philosopher. He wants a simple answer, so he can go back to his table of friends and show off. What do you tell him? What’s a right? What do you say to this Australian dude?
JOHN: Well, yes, one would have to probably modify the way one expresses this in the wine bar context. [laughter] Or probably, more accurately, pub context. But I think, you know, the notion we came to, a couple of minutes ago, about a status people possess that imposes obligations on others —
REBECCA: He’s already — he’s looking a little confused. Even simpler?
JOHN: Well —
REBECCA: How can we say status? Position?
JOHN: Well, there are certain ways you need to treat people —
REBECCA: Yeah.
JOHN: Otherwise, you’ll be wronging them.
REBECCA: Good!
JOHN: How about that? [laughter]
REBECCA: I like that! I think your friend is happy. He’s gone back to his table. He’s showing off. All is good. The sun is shining. John, thanks so much for joining me. This has been really fun, and I think we managed to get some — to get to the heart of the matter.
JOHN: It’s a great pleasure, Rebecca. Thank you so much.
