Word: etzioni
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...patients for AIDS. Some people argue for mandatory testing; others insist that it be voluntary. But both groups seem concerned only with the patient's rights. "No one on either side wonders if the patient has a responsibility to his fellow human beings," says George Washington University sociologist Amitai Etzioni. "The language focuses almost exclusively on individual rights, which are quickly described as absolute and which are then disconnected from societal obligations...
...widespread is this sort of disaffection, says author John Taylor in a sizzling New York magazine article, that a double-barreled social phenomenon now threatens the real exercise of civil liberties. The first barrel is "victimology." The other is what George Washington University sociologist Amitai Etzioni calls the "rights industry" -- the creation by individuals and special-interest groups of freshly minted freedoms and prerogatives that must be upheld even when they are foolishly asserted, and whose transgression is -- always -- a matter for outcry...
...that words can hurt, or that civil rights and tolerance are essential in a democracy, but that hypersensitivity clouds rational discourse: how to knit a contentious American society together rather than allow it to become balkanized by competing interests. "We need to reset the thermostats," writes sociologist Etzioni, "not shatter windows or tear down walls. Extremism in defense of virtue is a vice...
These questions represented to Etzioni case studies in which the aggressive ! defense of individual legal rights is at odds with the safety of the larger community. But Galston, who signed on as a co-editor of Responsive Community, stresses that his own approach "is not to water down or trump certain rights in the name of something else. Instead, we need to think in a fresh way about what rights we do have...
...Etzioni seems animated by his own agenda: intense hostility to legal efforts by civil libertarians to restrict police behavior and uphold individual rights. He says, "I'm hard put to find any organization that is so actively opposed to communitarian issues as the A.C.L.U." The American Civil Liberties Union already has critics to spare; George Bush made it a major theme of his 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis. Moreover, A.C.L.U. executive director Ira Glasser argues, "The problem with the Etzioni group is that they assume incorrectly that individual rights are not a public good...