"Context Is All"

 And admittedly I don't have the full context for this Hauerwas quote:

I can illustrate what I mean by suggesting that rights language has become too powerful by calling attention to a remark by someone who I believe was in the Department of Justice during the Civil Rights campaign in Mississippi. Several Civil Rights Workers had been killed, the spokesman for the Department of Justice was appropriately outraged. In order to express his outrage he resorted to the moral vocabulary in which he most felt at home.  He said those who had been killed had had their rights violated.  When "rights" become a more basic moral description than murder you have an indication that your language has gone on a holiday. 

Of course, one cannot help but have sympathy for the Department of Justice representative.  He was using the most significant language he knew to indicate what a horrible moral crime had been committed.  Yet the very appeal to the violation of rights as fundamental moral description may indicate a profound worry about such a morality.  For if confidence in the language of rights is lost it is not clear what the alternative to nihilism will be. I worry, therefore, that for many reasons some are trying to make the language of rights do more work than it is capable of doing. 

But it puts me in mind of Wittgenstein's concept of "language games," where words used in one context mean something completely different in another; yet one doesn't recognize the distinction, and thereby introduces confusion.  For example:

Suppose I say that the body will rot, and another says "No. Particles will rejoin in a thousand years, and there will be a Resurrection of you." If some said: "Wittgenstein, do you believe in this?" I'd say: "No." "Do you contradict the man?" I'd say: "No."

...

Suppose someone were a believer and said: "I believe in a Last Judgment," and I said: "Well, I'm not so sure. Possibly." You would say that there is an enormous gulf between us.  If he said "There is a German aeroplane overhead," and I said "Possibly I'm not so sure," you'd say we were fairly near.  It isn't a question of my being anywhere near him, but on an entirely different plane, which you could express by saying: "You mean something altogether different, Wittgenstein."

...

Whether something is a blunder or not--it is a blunder in a particular system. Just as something is a blunder in a particular game and not in another.

With the middle example as our guide, the Justice Department spokesman means something altogether different than Hauerwas supposes, because they aren't speaking within the same language games.  I say this simply because there is no federal murder statute; but murderers (such as the men who killed Ahmed Arbery) can be tried in federal court for civil rights violations.  So the DOJ spokesperson was not, as Hauerwas presumes, speaking in absolute terms of rights (as Hauerwas is), he was speaking of "rights" as a term of art within federal civil rights law.

Law is what Wittgenstein would call a "particular system."  True, "rights" spills out of law into everyday discourse, as Hauerwas argues; and there our problems begin, per Hauerwas' argument (I'm not here to critique that; I need to study it, in fact.)  But his example is, shall we say, poorly chosen.

To put a fine point on it, I agree with this:

If you need a theory of rights to know that torture is wrong, or if you think you need rights to ground your judgements that torture  is morally wrong, then something has clearly gone wrong with your moral sensibilities. What follows is my attempt to defend that remark by giving you a list of what I regard as some of the disabilities associated with rights language. 

But "rights language" is a language game of its own, and "rights" is not always the same term in every such game. 

*The irony of repeatedly using a portrayal of Solomon for these posts is not lost on me.  As Walter Brueggeman pointed out in a lecture I attended once, Solomon bought his wisdom with the money he made as, literally, a Middle Eastern arms dealer.  He hired scholars, had them write wise things and, being king, he took credit for it. Same as it ever was.