The Coming Good Society: Why New Realities Demand New Rights

by William F. Schulz, Sushma Raman

Two authors with decades of experience promoting human rights argue that, as the world changes around us, rights hardly imaginable today will come into being.

A rights revolution is under way. Today the range of nonhuman entities thought to deserve rights is exploding--not just animals but ecosystems and even robots. Changes in norms and circumstances require the expansion of rights: What new rights, for example, are needed if we understand gender to be nonbinary? Does living in a corrupt state violate our rights? And emerging technologies demand that we think about old rights in new ways: When biotechnology is used to change genetic code, whose rights might be violated? What rights, if any, protect our privacy from the intrusions of sophisticated surveillance techniques?

Drawing on their vast experience as human rights advocates, William Schulz and Sushma Raman challenge us to think hard about how rights evolve with changing circumstances, and what rights will look like ten, twenty, or fifty years from now. Against those who hold that rights are static and immutable, Schulz and Raman argue that rights must adapt to new realities or risk being consigned to irrelevance. To preserve and promote the good society--one that protects its members' dignity and fosters an environment in which people will want to live--we must at times rethink the meanings of familiar rights and consider the introduction of entirely new rights.

Now is one of those times. The Coming Good Society details the many frontiers of rights today and the debates surrounding them. Schulz and Raman equip us with the tools to engage the present and future of rights so that we understand their importance and know where we stand.

Genres: Nonfiction

304 pages, Hardcover

First published June 9, 2020

Reviews

[Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schulz and Raman argue that “rights” (as in human rights, although this book covers rights of non-humans as well) are transactional, meaning that they are a human-invented concept meant to help us treat each other well, not based on any inherent natural law. I read this book as part of a religious/philosophical book club in which people’s theological beliefs tend to differ, so we determined pretty quickly that if you tend to be more of a theist than a humanist, this concept might not work for you.

But whether you agree with the “transactional” idea or not, Schulz and Raman also argue that rights change over time as our awareness or perspective changes, and this is really the central thesis of the book: that we should periodically question and expand our ideas of who—or what—has rights and what those rights are. They cover some ground that is definitely twenty-first century but not completely new, such as rethinking sex and gender, privacy rights in the age of smart phones and social media algorithms, and the ethics of genetic and ancestry research. All worth a read. But I had personally not thought of living in a non-corrupt society as something that could be considered a human right—and I thought their arguments for this were pretty compelling.

Although “animal rights” isn’t a new concept at all, they took a fresh take on it, considering animal rights from the perspective of our new knowledge about consciousness and sentience in various species. As in so many places in this book, the authors raise thorny questions that don’t have easy answers, such as how we treat our pets and whether we should have livestock. However, I think the assertion that all humans can have a nutritious diet that is completely plant-based (unlike “obligate carnivores” such as cats) is a little shaky—frankly, I think a lot of current nutrition science is deeply flawed, and I suspect that although many people would be healthy with a vegan diet, many others would not. Lab-grown meat is a promising alternative, but it needs more study; it may not be nutritionally equivalent (or straight-up unhealthy, considering how some of our previous food technology went, such as trans-fats) or environmentally better.

Speaking of the environment, I found the chapter on the rights of nature to be the weakest in the book. I definitely agree with the concept that humans should think of themselves as part of nature rather than “above” it (and I can even kind of buy into the whole “Gaia hypothesis” that the earth is one big organism), but I thought this chapter didn’t adequately overcome its own stated objection that assigning rights to plants would kill all animals (including us). It seems to me that the right to a non-polluted environment is more of a human right, and maybe even an animal right, than a right to be assigned to the rivers or air to not be polluted. So they lost me a bit there.

But the chapter on AI rights was interesting. The authors applied three concepts for considering animal rights—that not all animals need to be assigned rights, that not all human rights apply to animals (e.g., animals don’t vote), and that not all animal rights can be applied in all circumstances (e.g., when animals threaten human lives)—to potential rights of artificial intelligence, which I thought was a helpful framework.

Pulling it all together, I think overall the idea that we should continually review our ideas about rights, human and non-human, is a good one. This book raises a lot more questions than it answers, but we can’t hope to answer the questions we don’t think to ask.

[Kinley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an interesting one in terms of political theory and philosophy about rights. While not everyone may agree with some of their conclusions (especially in the later sections), The Coming Good Society was intriguing and a good thought-provoking read. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the area and debates about rights as it is interesting and a good book to discuss with others.

[David Fredh · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Coming Good Society argues that as technology, ecology, and social norms evolve, the scope of rights must expand beyond human beings to include animals, ecosystems, and potentially intelligent machines. The book frames this not as a utopian wish list but as a pragmatic extension of the human rights tradition into new domains that increasingly affect our lives.

[Heidi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed listening to this book. It is though provoking, challenging and informative. I think everyone could benefit from it's information.