Confusing personal rights with impersonal rights

From Robert Zaretsky "What We Owe to Others: Simone Weil's Radical Reminders" (in the NYT)

The problem, for Weil, with the liberal conception of rights — and the laws that codify them — is that it is rooted in the personal, not the impersonal. Our society, she insists, is one where personal rights are tied at the hip to private property....

Moreover, the emphasis on “inalienable human rights”— a phrase, Weil declares, history has shown to be meaningless — blinds us to the only true good, one rooted in what Weil calls the “impersonal.” This term, paradoxically, describes what is most essential to our flesh and blood lives: the needs shared by all human beings and the obligations (and not rights) to one another that they entail. These needs, listed in her “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations,” include nourishment and clothing, medical care and housing, as well as protection against violence. (Though opposed to capital punishment, Weil made an exception for rape.)

With her knack for striking illustrations, Weil confronts us with the limits of rights claims. “If someone tries to browbeat a farmer to sell his eggs at a moderate price, the farmer can say: ‘I have the right to keep my eggs if I don’t get a good enough price.’ But if a young girl is being forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation, the word would sound ludicrously inadequate.”

This is why, when we ask why we have less than others, we are getting personal, but when we ask why we are being hurt, we are getting impersonal. And for Weil, the impersonal is good in every sense of the word. In the case of her illustration, Weil finds the notion of rights ludicrous because the girl is not being cheated of a profit. Instead, she is being cheated of her very humanity. There is no true compensation for such acts. And yet, by confusing personal rights with impersonal (or universally shared) needs, we burden ourselves with a language that deflects us from what is truly at stake. As Weil declares: “There is something sacred in every human being, but it is not their person. It is this human being; no more and no less.”