Note 21

What if the constitutive powers to execute the action of the right is dependent on the individual and the social resources which establish the condition and the rules for the exercise of the rights. Think of a traffic light system where the arbitrary rules of the game allow for the constitutive configuration through which the possibility of orderly movement through the space of concepts is enabled, with the coordinates of actuality as it is reinterpreted by the concept in societal forms being the specific rules as actualized in the operation of the traffic lights.

In this case, the potentiality of individual man itself serves as an underlying factor which gives substance and meaning to the operation of the rules, but which remains dependent, causally and cognitively, on the resources of established concepts, associations and rules. If one then applies Paine’s method of establishing criteria of distinguishing between natural and civil liberties, one asks, simultaneously, a few key questions. In what way is the establishment of the toolkit and the content of the concept as a resource constitutive of the powers which are enabled and expressed through individual initiative? What is the set of criteria for determining, in this situation of reciprocally-conditioning dependence, the kind of capacities and therefore abilities that are crucial for the actual operation of the concept, or the aspects of the concept that are deemed to be productive of claims to right? This itself necessitates a series of value judgements that allow us to interpret what the action is for, and what it is, and therefore what is important in it. Therefore the competing accounts of the nature and ends of human agency come into play. (Or rather, the ends and therefore the nature of agency.)