Ariadne's Thread on Justice
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Moral Rights

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John Speaking
I agree with Ann that we have to be clear about what moral rights are and what reasons there are to say that people have any rights at all. I also believe that rights are a human creation. Saying that people have moral rights or natural rights is not like saying that they have fingers and toes.

I can offer a rough definition of what it is to have a moral right to something. If we are talking about a negative or non-interference right, many philosophers would agree that to say that A has a moral right to do X is equivalent to saying that it would be morally wrong for anyone to interfere with A doing X. In other words, other people have a moral duty not to interfere with A doing X. If we are talking about a positive right, then A having a right to X is equivalent to saying that someone or some institution has a duty to provide A with X.

We have a similar situation with legal rights. If I have a legal right to leave my house, it would be illegal for someone to prevent me from doing so. If I have a positive right to an attorney, then the state has a duty to provide me with one.

I'm not so sure whether any of the arguments for recognizing individual moral rights are sound arguments. But I can say that historically, there have been many kinds of foundations suggested for individual moral rights. For example:
  • John Stuart Mill founded rights on utility 
  • Immanuel Kant and Alan Gewirth founded rights on rational/conceptual considerations
  • John Locke founded natural rights on theology
  • John Rawls founds rights on a hypothetical contract
  • Loren Lomasky founds basic rights on rational prudence
  • Robet Nozick founds rights (or 'side constraints' as he calls them) on moral intuitions about small scale situations (although I think he also had other kinds of arguments for strong individual rights)
  • Lawrence Haworth and Eric Mack have attempted to found rights on the value of autonomy. See Haworth's Autonomy and Mack "How To Derive Libertarian Rights" in Reading Nozick
Rights have often been assigned to people based on certain facts about them:
  • specific capacities (e.g., to develop a concept of the good life or a plan of life or to devise projects that are part of life)
  • social roles
  • merit
  • intelligence
  • performance/product
  • needs
  • the capacity to feel pleasure and pain
If there are basic human rights, they would presumably be allocated on the basis of something that all normal people have in common. Basic needs or some important human capacity (like the capacity to make choices) would be obvious possibilities.

I'm wondering whether any of these considerations serve our purposes today?
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