Can we talk this week about the rhetorical use of the word “entitlement?” Seems to crop up now and then and I think it’s a good example of the misleading, selective perception sort of wordplay, often about distributional issues, conservatives tend to promote.
Much like “rights,” one can think about entitlements in either a legal or ethical context. A legal entitlement is based on laws established by government and enforced by courts. An ethical entitlement is something one may make up based on one’s own subjective ethical theorizing. An ethical entitlement cannot be enforced in a court of law unless it coincides with a legal entitlement, based most likely in a democracy on other people holding similar ethical views. They’re two very different things. Voters via our democratic government make laws relating to the definition, distribution, and use of economic power, markets, and more broadly allocation of scarce resources. Under those laws, people are legally entitled to various things. Those things are legal entitlements. If one enters into a contractual relationship with someone to do some work for some amount of pay, and one does the work, that pay becomes an entitlement. One is legally entitled to it. If the other party doesn’t cough it up, one may take them to court to collect. If dear old mum leaves one some money in her will, that’s a legal entitlement. If one doesn’t get the money, one may take the matter to court to get the money to which one is legally entitled. It doesn’t depend on what so and so thinks about it, one is legally entitled to it.
There’s a tendency in conservative ideology to use “entitlement” as a pejorative meant to apply only to laws they personally dislike, so for example, Social Security may be castigated as an entitlement, but not other things as inheritance, for example. The rhetorical intent seems to be to draw implicit parallels to people who feel “entitled” in the vernacular, who think they’re special, should have things they’re not actually legally entitled to or possibly not ethically entitled to under some ethical theory or other. That’s not an intellectually honest or sincere way of expressing normative opposition to particular legal entitlements. One should, if one likes, simply say something like, “I don’t feel Social Security as a program is ethically justified. I oppose it.” Castigating it on the grounds of its status as a legal entitlement is misleading because it raises the possibility one proposes legal entitlements, in general, are unjustified, perhaps because one rejects democracy, or perhaps government, law in general. This disappearing government act by which opposition to certain laws, policies, regulations, whatever, become misstated as a generalized opposition to democracy, government, law, and so on, is what I call “fake anarchism” and it’s a very common technique in conservative rhetoric. It’s more common in right wing rhetoric than in left wing rhetoric. For example, although a leftist may suppose some level of profit, wages, returns on stocks, inheritance, whatever, ethically unjustified, one rarely hears them castigating them as legal entitlements.
We have a legal system that governs the definition, distribution, use of economic power. People are legally entitled to things. If voters change laws, people may be legally entitled to different things. That’s how laws work. So, do you oppose entitlements? Or particular laws? Remember conservatives will rarely try to talk sincerely, clearly, honestly to avoid confusion, conflict. They’ll do the opposite of that. They’ll play word games, equivocate on terms, conflate issues, be tricksy. One must keep one’s wits about one when talking with them.
Addendum
A reader pointed out that in addition to the general legal right sense of “entitlement” I discuss here, another definition involves a particular variety of legal right involving a defined benefit to a member of a specified group, so simple equivocation on different definitions of the word “entitlement” or really even a sort of level issue may be involved here. However, as far as that second definition, as I’ve argued before, I would suggest there is little substantive difference between voters operating through democracy making laws relevant to more general definition and voters making laws relevant to the more specific definition. Actually, I suppose at another level, all legal entitlements give defined benefits to a member of some class of people. For example, inheritance laws are not set up on behalf of Mr. Joe Smith, or whoever, in particular. They relate to the class of people who meet certain criteria.
