 Erswn, ydych. Fy enw'r tybl yw'r amser. Mae hynny'n amdano'n cael cael cael gail antymu a gwylltu'n fwyfyrdd hosbitalol. Rydyn ni'n gael eu gweithio'r hynny'n bobl yn gymheg yr Oedoladau i gweithio'r antymu ararigion gwaithach ar mach o bobl. Dysgu'n fy ysgrifanaeth iddyn nhw'n gwybod nhw'n ddal sydd wedi nhu'n gweithio'n dwylo. Dwi'n wedi bod gwelio i'n dywedd i ti'r hyn yn fodganfod mwyaf yw gweld, ond peidiau byw i'w pwysig i'w grŵr ffysg acroesiau theodraethau ac yn hyn i ddechrau i'r Bellman a'r Lewis Carroll, dda hi iawn o'r snark. Wit yw ddim yn gobl ychydig mewn cyrraff. Rydyn ni, arall, dylai i ddim byd roedd ar y temty ni, rwy'n dangos i gyda'r tro, a beth hynny yn ddelwyd y troWhen yn oes i ymellain i'r rhaid.дw Iaf y gallwn gwirionedd o'r pwyll蘭 yn cyfan o bwysig hynny sydd yn cael gwirionedd o bwysig ar gyfael yn collihau ymlaen a o dechreuu i'r gwirioneddol hefyd o'r discriff a wedi'u gwirioneddol hefyd gyda'n i dechrau i'r sydd ar gyfer. On the very day on which I started to think about this talk, I happened to notice a sign on an orthophonist's office in France to the effect that good hearing is a right. So if you can't hear me, your rights are being infringed. And this was on the day on which Pope Francis declared that access to clean water was a human right. And on that day also I read an article about the right to assisted suicide. And a young American I read on that day was suing an employer because the employer had infringed his rights by demanding that he attend Bible study as a condition of his employment. And then yesterday actually or maybe the day before I was reading that in Berlin a group of young people is claiming that there is a right to a home in the centre of Berlin which seemed to me to suggest that it will soon become rather crowded. Now I don't think this is at all exceptional on the contrary we are now surrounded by a talk of rights as surrounded by it as we are by commercial advertising. And I therefore thought it would be worth considering the effect that the very concept of rights has on people's minds on our culture and also on our politics. And I personally think this effect is almost entirely baleful bad. Well let's examine briefly the examples I've given from the day on which I started to think about this talk. First the right to good hearing. This surely suggests that if I go deaf my rights have somehow been infringed or abrogated. But by whom? By what agency? It's true that in some cases of deafness I may have been subjected to noise against my will for example rock music in shots. Or I may have caused it myself by using personal stereo's which I play too loud but surely I cannot have infringed my own rights. Besides of course there are many causes of deafness whose causes are unknown. We don't know what the causes are. Does a tumour or otosclerosis represent an attack on anyone's rights? Well you might say the orthophonist was only just advertising. He was only advertising his wares. He was at most being rhetorical. He didn't intend to be taken seriously. Well this is quite possible. But the fact remains that his choice of language was significant since it was designed to attract people. However rhetoric, even advertising rhetoric is often taken seriously. The fact is that once something has been declared a right to be a right it enters people's mind on a kind of completely different metaphysical sphere. It goes into metaphysical orbit as it were which severs it completely from the world of empirical fact or possibility. Thus the orthophonist did not say what was true namely if you have hearing loss I may or may not be able to help you. Which isn't a very inspiring truth. But rather he suggested what was false namely that hearing loss is never a natural or irrecoverable phenomenon. Hearing loss therefore becomes abnormal and an assault on persons rights with the resultant destruction of equanimity, resilience, fortitude or understanding of the tragic dimension of life. Well rights spread rather like potassium permanganate, a crystal spread in a beaker of water. For example in the run up to the turn of the millennium the world health organisation used a slogan health for all by the year 2000. Note that it did not say health care for all by the year 2000 but health itself. Health care for all is at least an attainable goal and in a sense one that has actually already been attained in so far as there are a few places in the world. Where people live entirely without it, though in many places of course it may be of low quality. The fact that a goal is attainable however does not mean that it is a right. Although the universal declaration of human rights of 1948 says that health care is a human right as is health. Everyone has a right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and of his family including medical care. This is part of the universal declaration of human rights. Since the WHO's definition of health is that it is not merely the absence of disease but the positive presence of complete, complete physical, social and psychological wellbeing and hands up the healthy in this room. If you're healthy I'm afraid you're mistaken, if you think you're healthy. And since health is a right it follows that any derogation whatever from wellbeing is an infringement of that right. We have moved in a few simple words from the right to the pursuit of happiness to the right to happiness itself. Again you say that doesn't really matter because no one reads the universal declaration of human rights or the sermons of the World Health Organization anyway so it doesn't really matter. But I would remind you of something I hesitate to quote Keynes in this audience but he did say something of some importance. The ideas of economists and this is a famous passage of course, the ideas of economists and political philosophers both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority who hear voices in the air are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. In other words ideas are like rumours and like rumours they spread and of course they influence both belief and ultimately behaviour. If you believe that behaviour is influenced by belief which I do. A few years ago I was asked by a magazine to review seven memoirs of illness. This is a new genre and in fact there are now university courses in English departments devoted entirely to illness literature. And of course these memoirs were all written by educated middle class people because only educated middle class people are self important enough to write such memoirs and in several of them there was an undercurrent of quarrelousness. Well in fact most of them. After all the persons in question had always, they'd always gone jogging. They'd eaten healthily according to the latest doctrine of what eating healthily is. They'd never used glyphosate in their gardens and so on and so forth and yet here they were they were still ill. And they wrote as if their rights had been infringed because they'd stuck to the rules of being healthy. Sometimes at considerable cost to themselves. They felt that an injustice had by falling ill they had suffered an injustice. And of course the search was on for the person whom they could sue. The tendency of rights to enter a different metaphysical sphere is illustrated in the following case. There was a male nurse in my hospital who was an intelligent and very nice young man who did his work very well. But as is commonly the case in England now he had natural bad taste and he put earrings in his ear, not just one, but a whole row of them like this. And unfortunately this had a rather unfortunate or unsettling effect on old ladies who recovered from delirium. And they returned to delirium as being preferable. Actually the difference between delirium and reality now is rather small but anyway. The hospital management told him he had to remove the earrings. But he said he had a right to put earrings in his ear. What he couldn't grasp and what one often sees in this kind of situation is that he was not being denied the right to wear his earrings. He was being denied the right to wear his earrings and work as a nurse in the hospital. As far as he was concerned if he had a right to wear his earrings he had a right to do them in all circumstances whatsoever. Otherwise the right would not have been a right. And he had the right. Rights are by definition inalienable. Thus they make people uncompromising. In the prison in which I worked I met two men accused of trying to murder their neighbours in flats in which they lived. And this was because their neighbours played their music very loudly in the small hours of the morning. Let me tell you it is terrible. These buildings actually shake with the music. And the neighbours refused to moderate the volume of the music they were playing. And they said and they enforced this with baseball bats. We don't play baseball in England but where there are many baseball bats they said that they had a right to play their music. And that for them was the end of the matter. Three o'clock in the morning, four o'clock in the morning playing their music as loud as they like. Preventing 100 people from being able to sleep that was of no account. Well I asked a young patient of mine a 17 year old girl what she wanted to do in her life. And she said she wanted to be a lawyer. So I asked her what branch of law attracted her. And an expression came over her as if she were just about to declare that she had a religious vocation. This is what would have been the case 60 years ago. She said I want to do human rights. And of course human rights are much more lucrative than religious vocations but I didn't say that. I said oh yes that's very interesting. I said tell me where do human rights come from? And what do you mean she asked me and where I said there seem to be a lot of them about these days? What is that? I mean how are human rights found? And were they always there like America waiting to be discovered by Columbus? Or do we make them up as we go along? Well she said you can't ask that and she was horrified. And perhaps it was rather unfair she was only 17. But the fact is that she had absorbed the notion of rights probably of many such rights quite unthinkingly without any possible questioning. It's just part of the zeitgeist. Well let me now come to Pope Francis' suggestion that clean or potable water is a human right. Potable water is of course something tangible and it must be produced. It doesn't come at least in modern conditions just by itself. If everyone has the right to consume it, who has the corresponding duty to provide it? The neighbours, the village, the town, the district, the country, the whole world? The corresponding duty to the right is something tangible. Always involves the coercion of somebody even where that person is willing to be coerced. When someone claims the right to assisted suicide is also claiming that someone has the duty to assist him. Recently in the New England Journal of Medicine there was an article claiming that once society or the medical profession has decided that a certain kind of conduct is ethical, the individual doctor has no right to decline himself in accord with that ethical principle. In other words it is foreseeable that at some time a doctor could be held to be acting unethically in refusing to kill his patient on the grounds that his patient had a right to assisted suicide. And incidentally why should only the dying have assisted suicide? Why should only the dying have a good death? Again the psychological fact is that talk of rights tends to truncate the moral imagination. And I think it's a fair bet that if I were to say to young school leavers or university students that people have no right to clean water, many of them would reply so you think it's all right for people to have to drink dirty disease ridden water. And certainly when I've suggested to medical students that people have no right to medical care, most of them have said so you think it's all right for people just to die in the street. As if there were nothing between the universal right to health care and the black death. And when in answer I've asked them to think of some reason why people should not just be left to die in the street other than that they had a right to health care. They have been unable to think of any. That is to say the idea of rights seems to drive all other moral considerations from people's minds. Well let's now consider the case of the man who believed that his right not to be discriminated against on grounds of religion were infringed by the company that sacked him because he would not attend Bible study sessions. Now I confess that I find the company's insistence odious, odiously unctuous, worthy of satire by Dickens and it disgusts me. On the other hand it seems to me that the company has a right, the natural right if I may so put it, to demand such condition of its workers provided that it is privately owned and that it is not in the position of a monopoly employer. That is to say that the person who refuses to attend Bible classes has a choice of employment elsewhere. Whether the right of a private company to discriminate between potential employers on grounds seemingly unrelated to the ostensible purpose of the company, though of course the owners might claim that their ultimate purpose was the spreading of the word of Jesus. That was the ultimate purpose of their company. Whether that should prevail over a man's right not to be badgered into religious study is a question that inevitably generates conflict in the present context. The debate over abortion in the United States pits two seemingly incompatible rights, one against the other. The right to life of the fertilised ovum against the right of a woman to do whatever she likes with her body. And all the two sides can do is to shout at one another that my right is more fundamental than your right and therefore should prevail. And the debate doesn't get any further than that and this is after many, many years. Where rights conflict as inevitably they will as more and more of them are granted, floating as I say into a completely different metaphysical sphere as soon as they are granted, they have to be adjudicated. This of course confers immense powers on the state or whatever organisation to interfere in the smallest change of life. It extends the reach of administration and makes the law the arbiter of all that is permissible or impermissible. And this is illustrated by an expression now used in self-justification of unpleasant behaviour in Britain. There is no law against it. There is no law against it. In other words, what is legally permissible is permissible in every other sense because what the law permits is a right. So you can do what you have a right to do and no other moral consideration needs to be taken into account and often by people is not taken into account. Now I come now to the point in which my talk on the psychology rights touches on my advertised subject, the subject of psychology of multiculturalism. Rights having first encouraged a kind of egotistical individualism in the population, individualism without much individuality I must say, are now widely believed also to adhere in or belong to groups. So long as those groups are perceived to be in some way handicapped, oppressed or victimised now or at some time in the past, not only individuals but groups then are believed to have rights. Again these rights often conflict but this is all to the advantage of a bureaucratic apparatus of adjudicators. Among the group rights claimed in practice by the leaders of groups who are themselves almost always self-appointed is the right not to be offended, which of course includes the right to decide what is offensive. There is no need for an objective correlative. You are offended of course if you say you are. But just as the appetite grows with eating so does taking offence increase with having taken previous offence. And since taking offence gives one the right to decree what may or may not be said, being offended actually becomes an exercise in power. Incidentally the politicisation of supposed group rights increasingly puts social pressure on individuals who belong to that group to accept, adopt or at least not demur from the supposed collective opinion of that group. It goes without saying that the more groups that claim the right not to be offended on the grounds that either in the past or the present they have been persecuted or maltreated, the narrower and narrower the range of opinion that can be expressed. Which groups are to be protected from offence becomes itself a matter of conflict. But the fact is that the majority of the population by now belongs to one minority or another that claims the right to decide what is offensive. An atmosphere not exactly of terror that would be a bit of an exaggeration but at least a fear and anxiety that I think is now general has resulted. People are afraid to speak their mind. Anelistic colleague of mine in an American publication for which I write and who herself always writes in a measured way and never expresses an opinion that is absurd or indefensible has now to live under police protection because she has published work that offends certain groups. Not long ago the Irish television service asked me to give my opinion on the sudden rise in the western world of the question of transsexualism. Now incidentally called transgenderism a change of vocabulary which I find significant and far from innocent. The producers of the program wanted to find someone to say that the rise to prominence of this question or problem was something other than a great social advance and it was not a great advance for the freedom of mankind. But they were having great difficulty not with finding anyone who was of that opinion but finding anyone who was willing to express that opinion in public. In other words a very small group had managed within a matter of a few years. I don't know when this question first came to prominence. Difficult to say but it's certainly not more than five years ago. This group has managed to prohibit debate on a subject that is at the very least debatable doing so by claiming the right not to be offended. In no time at all practically their right has enabled them and their supporters to impose what is a very strange view on the world that only a tiny minority of the population has. In a Dutch university recently where I gave a talk there were notices on the lavatories in joining users not to embarrass transsexuals claiming that we can do better. And debate has been so effectively silenced that there is no debate even in medical circles. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association published in 2013 gave the prevalence of transsexualism as about 0.0035% of the population that is to say approximately one person in 30,000. Five years later so four years later I apologize in 2017 an article in the New England Journal of Medicine gave the prevalence as 0.6% that is to say an increase in only four years of 17,000%. What was I found most significant about this was that it passed without notice or commentary and even to have commented on it or to have noticed it would have caused offence and people are afraid. Increasingly groups or their supposed leaders claim the right to be represented in demographic proportion in the more prestigious or lucrative positions in society as far as I know no pressure group has ever been formed for the right to sweep the roads. If all groups are not represented proportionately in the higher reaches of society there can be only one explanation of it that is to say discrimination and to discriminate is an attack on the rights of the discriminated against. Can only be altered or improved by a resort to a vast political, legal and administrative apparatus to ensure that supposed justice is done and I am not sure whether I told you about this some years ago, one year ago, two years ago. But in the hospital in which I worked they sent a questionnaire to the employees asking them to state their sexual orientation and there were only six choices. And I said that really they ought to, this shows a very limited sexual imagination and that they ought to read Kraft Ebbing and Psychopathia sexualis and races, I think there were 17 races. They omitted the Melanesians and religions there were quite a few but all together and the reason for this inquiry was so that they could pay us correctly that is to say proportionately to the proportion of people in their various categories. Well, whatever one might think of the doctrine of human rights, I think it fair to say it was intended to expand the scope of human freedom and actually did so. But in our hands, I mean in the hands of the intellectuals of our time, the doctrine of rights has been increasingly used to assume power and limit freedom. So in summary I would say that the notion of rights has the following effects. It increases egotism at an insensate individualism. It increases self-esteem at the expense of self-respect. People have a right to self-esteem. It promotes a psychological dialectic between resentment and ingratitude since what is received as of right is not appreciated since it is received as of right. And what is actually received is actually usually less than what people think that they are entitled to, thus becoming a cause of resentment. It induces a permanent state of quarrelous vigilance insofar as it is feared that one's rights are being constantly infringed. It causes perpetual conflict between different people's rights that are not compatible, an incompatibility that can only be resolved either by legal action that's in the best of cases or in some cases violence. And insofar as rights are inalienable, inalienable, they trump, if I may use that word, four other moral considerations. And while promoting personal egotism they also promote group rights which entails the balkanisation of society and the promotion of the idea that the division of the spoils is the main aim of political and economic life. The slices and crumbs of the economic cake to be assigned according to some abstract but self-interested plan. And I think, ladies and gentlemen, the consequences of the notion of rights for human freedom are therefore obvious. Thank you very much.