On Group rights

Towards the end of the final and only season of Twin Peaks: The Return (Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series; Showtime, 2017) a scene takes place in which the main character (Kyle MacLachlan; Detective Cooper; Dougie?) faces a dilemma. There’s some unfinished business he’s got to take care of in Washington State, a long plane ride away. He’s going to be gone for a while. In the context of the show’s plot, it seems it could be even for good. MacLachlan/Cooper breaks the news to his wife and son on the floor of a small-time casino, among the colorful whirr and blink of slot machines and baccarat tables. The scene unfolds in an intimate way, with Lynch’s lens zooming in on MacLachlan’s/Cooper’s face as he kneels before his son and wife to break the bad news. The scene succeeds. MacLachlan, as is the case the whole series, shines. Throughout the two-or-three minutes he’s letting his family down, MacLachlan is almost smiling, an earnest but self-possessed sort of smile, not unlike that of a very ill person trying their best to assure everyone (despite all evidence to the contrary) they’re going to be okay. The actor who plays MacLachlan/Cooper’s son is around nine, and he portrays a broken-hearted but mostly confused nine-year-old well. Cooper’s wife (Naomi Watts) responds to the news as one would expect, with the right balance of incredulity and grief, making it easy for us in the audience to sympathize with her plight.

It’s during this scene—as father and son and mother are huddling together, leaning in close, oblivious of the colorful tumult of the casino lobby’s floor—that something onscreen seems to change. Or maybe it’s just in the viewer’s mind. It feels as if we’re no longer watching a father and mother and son sharing an intimate moment.

We’re watching a family.

This probably comes across as (1.) painfully obvious and (2.) passé—maybe even trite. Of course we’re watching a family. A dad and a mom and a kid: that’s paradigmatically what comes to most people’s minds when they hear the word family. A mother and mother and son, a father and father and adopted daughter—whatever iteration a ‘family’ might take, most of us know one when we see it. It’s something we can point to, something all of us can single out.

The problem is, though—we can’t just point to it. The word family is sort of like the word holiday or orchestra or hole or time. We know what it is. But it’s not something we can touch or hold or point to. It’s a descriptive term, a word that names or identifies something—conceptualized this way, the notion of ‘family’ seems to fit more naturally among the category of abstract entities: that is, things like the color red or the number seven.

This might not seem like a problem. We use words to describe things all the time, after all, and a lot of the time those things we’re describing don’t materially exist. (There does seem to be a distinction between our referring to a real, physically present, actually there ‘family’ that exists in space and time, like our own, and our referring to the notion or idea of a family without any physical referent, but then things become very complex very quickly, as it seems that to a certain degree even abstract entities exist in space and time, as there might not be some physical number seven that’s wandering around our world, but things like seven marbles, or seven houses, instantiating the number seven spatiotemporally, so it’s probably best for our purposes to steer clear of any meta-ontological talk of whether families ((as a referent or just a metaphysical notion)) belong to the category of abstract objects or are some other, maybe sociological phenomenon).

A more interesting question might be: what is it, really, that’s happening in this scene? What is it that’s making us in the audience sense we’re no longer watching three people sharing an intimate moment, but something else, something more unified, something collective?

There are a few possible answers. One is obvious. Maybe it’s just the deeply intimate nature of the scene. M/C, his wife, and his son are physically touching; they’re looking into each other’s eyes, oblivious to the clatter of roulette tables and bow-tied waiters passing and the general disorder of a small-time casino’s lobby floor. To the camera, everything else becomes ancillary; in the audience, we’re being directed, no pun intended, to pay attention to nothing else. Just as we might be more susceptible to feeling like we’re witnessing a ‘family’ onscreen while watching a man and a woman and a child seated at the dinner table together, as opposed to say, walking down the street, it’s the physical nature of what’s happening on screen that makes us feel as if we’re seeing something unified, something cohesive.

If that response isn’t convincing, here’s another: maybe it’s the nature of the news that’s being shared. Sure, it might help us in the audience feel like we’re seeing a family on screen when those individuals are physically close, or touching; intimacy is something that defines (most) families. But it would be silly to presume we don’t recognize a family as a family unless they’re physically close. Perhaps, in this scene, it’s just the gravity of the moment, the deep serious nature of the things that M/C’s saying, that’s responsible for the metaphysical shift on screen.

This seems plausible. In a way, I think it brings us close to the answer we’re looking for. But there’s more happening, I think, than this. 

A separate question this scene makes us ask is: is M/C doing what’s right? It’s hard to say. In fact, it’s a question that’s hard to answer even in the context of the show’s plot, maybe due to the fact that the screenplay’s author is Lynch, and it’s entirely possible the entire season was skillfully written to be incomplete at best and incoherent at worst. It seems plausible that M/C is leaving to do something important to him—an endeavor that might even be a matter of (his own) life and death. If we weigh the importance of his survival, his saving his own life, against whatever value his son and wife would gain from his staying (i.e., if we analyze things in axiological terms)—it seems that M/C does have some defensible reason to leave. But the question stands. Does that mean that his leaving is right?

One way to answer this (without delving into the show’s labyrinthine plot) is to ask: who would M/C be wronging if he left? Obviously, he’d be wronging his wife and son. The depth of their (fictional) emotion we witness on screen notwithstanding, reading the script would make an audience member feel the same way. We feel differently about M/C after he makes the decision he does—granted, there are some complications and specifics pertaining to the plot that make us feel like maybe he made the right choice in leaving (ones we’ll set aside for now).

In either case, questions relating to the rightness or wrongness of M/C’s choice seem—at last—to bring us closer to capturing an important point. It’s intimately tied to what we, the audience, are sensing during the casino scene.

By leaving, M/C is wronging more than just his wife and son. (If what he’s doing is, in fact, actually wrong). He’s wronging his family.

Predictably, there’s an obvious issue with this line of thought—one that delves back into painfully obscure and maybe unresolvable matters in ethics and metaphysics. That is: can you wrong something that doesn’t physically exist? Can you wrong the company you work for, say, even if your boss and your co-workers (or anyone else on payroll) never finds out about your wrongdoing? Say there’s a snowstorm during the work week. The roads are bad; you have to work from home. School’s cancelled; your children are cooped up at home, and they want you to come play—those few final emails or that expense report be damned. You give in. You go sled for an hour instead of typing up those emails or filing that report, which, it bears restating, you’re being paid to do. In this case, would you be wronging your boss? (Say she never finds out about it.) Would you be wronging your fellow employees? (They never find out either.) Or are you just wronging the company you work for, rather than any single individual? Does that last sentence even make sense?

Maybe the best way to frame this question would be: can immaterial things (things that don’t physically exist in space and time) hold rights against us?

It appears, now, we’ve fully moved on from talk about abstract entities. I.e., we’re no longer asking whether democracy, happiness, or motherhood exist—a question that be too inscrutable to answer satisfactorily even in a rigorous academic context. Rather, the question seems to now be: can you morally wrong something that isn’t materially real?

Like talk about abstract objects, this question spirals off into some of the most foundational topics in philosophy (the extent of our duty to the state, the grounding of deontological ethical theories, etc). So it’s not one we’re going to solve here. But talk of moral wrongings does introduce a new, important idea—one that could help us make sense of the shift we’re seeing onscreen. In some sense, by leaving his family, I think M/C is wronging himself. Not necessarily from an axiological standpoint, in that he’s automatically worse off by leaving, because he’s losing units of personal value simply in virtue of having a wife and child. Rather, by leaving, M/C plausibly is violating an obligation he holds against his own person. As we in the audience watch the scene, we get the sense there’s something over and above M/C’s wife and son he’s infringing a duty to; something that sort of hovers, wraith-like, above the heads of M/C and his wife and kid in the casino, something we can’t see or point to and yet is decidedly there.

This idea—that M/C is harming himself—seems finally to touch on what it is we’re trying to pin down. What’s happening in the casino might be best explained in the language of group rights.

Per the SEP: A group right is a right possessed by a group qua group rather than by its members severally. Groups rights are…claimed for organized groups such as commercial corporations, churches, political parties, universities and charitable associations.

MacLachlan/Cooper is paradigmatically a member of a group: he’s a father, bound by law and love and a sense of duty and whatever other metaphysical notions you might want to invoke to the other members of the group (wife and son). The scene is moving to us at least in part because M/C is violating a duty relating to his status as a member of that group; M/C is caught between a rock and a hard place. He’s got to hurt those he loves in order to do what he needs to do, and by making the decision he does (getting on a plane and leaving), it seems that he’s hurting that suddenly elusive and ephemeral and maybe-not-intangible entity: his family.

Maybe, beneath this close of a lens, it feels distasteful to frame M/C’s obligations to his family in juridical terms. There is obviously a deep emotional element to the decisions we make as part of groups to whom we belong; it’d be misguided to think we only frame our decisions in terms of whether we’re violating obligations or norms. Still, I think the notion of group rights can generalize, subsuming the sorts of extra-physical things that happen inside a family’s lifeworld, its collective beating heart. Take a paradigmatic family activity. Pizza night: the week’s ended; it’s time to celebrate with a good movie and soda and maybe (if Mom and Dad are feeling generous) cheese sticks. A certain thrill grips the household: one that every member emanates; one every member can share in. Chores are ceremoniously doled out. Who’s going to get out plates and napkins; who’s going to tip the delivery guy. A group activity is taking place, an endeavor formed and shared in by its members. To extend the analogy probably too far, it seems not unlike a corporation or a team going about its composite and complex business, with each member playing a minor but crucial part.

Now, presume a member of the family decides they want no part of pizza night at all. Whether or not this change of heart is justified (for whatever reason; say they decide they just don’t like pizza), it does feels like they’re violating a tacit agreement held by all members of the household (including themselves). They might not be violating a duty to take part in Pizza Night. Nobody signed a contract. People are human, humans change their minds. Nevertheless, a group member’s sudden and unexpected withdrawal from the group activity dims the atmosphere, it changes the vibe, it pops the collective bubble of shared, anticipatory joy.

The disgruntled family member isn’t infringing on any rights. Again: no contract. Still, I think they are failing to live up to some previously formed expectation, and whether or not this is wrong of them, the point holds: their failure to live up to an expectation held by the group they’re a part of, affects the group as a whole—including themselves.

Maybe this isn’t a profound idea. Maybe there might even be reasons to be suspicious about the idea that groups can hold rights in the first place. To wit: would we really want to advance a conception of rights that grants a corporation like McDonald’s moral patienthood, permitting them to be wronged, say, if a government administration suddenly increases sales tax on steel hoppers, making it twice as expensive to produce French fries as it was before? Do we really want to give McDonald’s a right against you, or me, if we were employees, not to go and play in the snow for an hour with our kids when every other employee and maybe our boss is doing the same thing? The question remains: who would we be wronging? A brick and mortar building?

Anyway, what even grounds a group’s justification to possess rights? To quote the SEP, one answer may be: Michael McDonald (1991) argues that it is a shared understanding amongst individuals that they are normatively bound to each other that makes them a group for moral purposes.[1]

This explanation seems like it could nip concerns about major conglomerates like McDonald’s or Microsoft holding rights in the bud. By conceptualizing Group Rights in terms of the dispositions or mental states of the members of the group themselves, the rights held by the group are really rights each individual holds. This way, there’s no shadowy enterprise that can make moral claims on its employees or members.

Unfortunately, conceptualized this way, it also seems to make the idea of a Group Right reducible—unnecessary, even. Why refer to a group as the right holder when it’s really the members of the group who hold the right? No conception of a metaphysical group would be necessary. You only need members, their rights, and nothing more.

Again, I think the answer can be accommodated by the scene in the casino. By making the difficult decision he does, M/C is breaking a bond to an entity he’s a member of and can consequently be hurt by the dissolution of. As a member of the group, he harms the group by leaving it, and by doing so, makes himself in some sense worse off. Even now, maybe it feels wrong to conceptualize the significance of a family in terms of law-like rules and duties. We lose some of the mystery, the intangible qualities that make human relationships so important, normatively and personally. Maybe, in that scene in that casino, what we’re witnessing is some singular, numinous moment that surpasses characterization, one encapsulating what it is to be human, bound by love and duty to other humans.

Maybe we should even hope for this to be the case.

Even if that’s right, though, it seems practically significant to conceptualize these human relationships in terms of the rights we owe those we’re bound to.

Love is more than a feeling. It’s a web of duties, rights, extra-personal considerations.

We know it when we see it.

On-screen, and in real life.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-journal-of-law-and-jurisprudence/article/abs/should-communities-have-rights-reflections-on-liberal-individualism/0731769C0FD387FBDAAB2A7ABAA178C6