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 Sidgwick (main path) |
 Fred |
 Vera |
 Dee |
 Source Document |
| Moral Rights |
| Dee
Speaking
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 The most important thing about rights is that they are a way of recognizing, valuing, and protecting our distinctness or separateness as individual
people. Utilitarianism cannot do that, but a serious theory of rights can. The core idea is that one person's good cannot be traded off to increase the good of someone else without his or her consent. Nor can one person be used against his or her will to provide good things for another. You may need a house or a car or a liver transplant, but you do not have a right to my labor,
my house, or my liver in order to satisfy your need.I'm not sure whether there are a priori arguments for human rights -- the sort of argument that depends on analyzing concepts, for example. I am quite certain that I reject utilitarian arguments for rights. It seems to me that rights founded on utility are not rights at all (since they cannot be invoked in the face of substantial utilitarian advantages). I'm rather agnostic about god, so I don't want to stake my claim on rights with a theological foundation. But we may be able to found individual rights on prudential concerns. One libertarian philosopher, Loren Lomasky, does something of this sort. Lomasky argues that we all have non-moral reasons to value our own capacity to pursue our own projects and to allow a certain amount of "moral space" to others. Furthermore, there are strong moral arguments for granting each of us the same amount of moral space. In other words, there are prudential reasons to recognize equal individual rights for all. Another libertarian philosopher, Jan Narveson, has argued that a broad social contract in the Lockean tradition would yield libertarian principles. This is also an argument that moves from prudence to libertarian rights. He argues that if we begin with a realistic state of nature, virtually everyone is better of by agreeing to libertarian principles. [Narveson, p. 176-181.] |
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