Sources & Extracts

Review this excerpt and then go back to the main thread.

Loren Lomasky has argued that there are prudential reasons for recognizing the rights of others and moral reasons to recognize equal rights for all. Lomasky's argument is complicated, but the following excerpts will give the flavor of the whole:

Therefore, it is a mistake to commence political analysis with a state-of-nature scenario in which each individual is entirely consumed by his own conceptions of value-for-himself and regards others only as obstacles to his own designs. It is a mistake both because from that point of entry there is no egress whatsoever and because it is blind to an important source of value....What is proposed by way of correction is a conception of project pursuers who are logically and biologically impelled to make a place within their projects for the concerns of others....

It need not be supposed that the disposition to behave altruistically is initially very high; only that it is present to some observable extent. B notes that the usually aggressive A from time to time defers to B. B values A's deference and disvalues A's aggression. Thus, B has reason, all else equal, to adopt patterns of activity that will maximize the ratio of A's deferential actions to A's aggressive actions....

Once B does move away from his initial, predominantly aggressive policy, even if only slightly, that will alter the constraints under which A is operating. A will now find his own aggressive acts more costly than before because they risk the loss of the newly acquired increment of deference from B....

It has been granted that Hume is correct when he maintains that contract as a basis for establishing a regime of mutual deference is unintelligible. In response, it has been demonstrated that policies incorporating a substantial amount of Active Deference can naturally evolve from a situation in which aggression predominates. Once that evolution has occurred, A and B are each the recipients of valued moral space that each has reason to accord to the other....

No mutual acknowledgement on the part of all transactors of binding moral principles has been appealed to in order to show how each project pursuer can find reason to grant moral space to others. Nor were rights presented as the ingenious invention of some proto-Archimedes who took for himself the task of designing an instrument for conflict modulation. Rather, it has been claimed that moral space will be fenced off through individuals' exercise of a practical reason that recognizes both personal and impersonal value. [Lomasky, Persons, Rights, and the Moral community, p. 70-74.]