Sources & Extracts

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

In his article "Natural rights, Equality, and the Minimal State" Samuel Scheffler attempts to begin with a premise taken from Robert Nozick and build an argument for positive rights. He argues as follows:

In other words, if the capacity to live a meaningful life is a uniquely valuable characteristic, and if we say that beings with this characteristic have rights, in virtue of which there are constraints on the way others must behave, then presumably the function of the rights is to safeguard the ability of beings with this valuable characteristic to develop it....But then it seems clear that the alternative conception of rights is a much more accurate specification than the Lockean conception of the rights which people actually have. For the alternative conception assigns to each individual the right to a sufficient share of all distributable goods whose enjoyment is necessary to have a reasonable chance of living a decent and fulfilling life. Now whatever a meaningful life may turn out to be, it seems reasonable enough to suggest that any distributable good necessary for living a decent and fulfilling life (such as food) will also be necessary for living a meaningful life. In fact, it seems reasonable to suggest that the distributable goods necessary to have a reasonable chance of living a meaningful life are just the same as the goods necessary to live a decent and fulfilling life. If that is so, then the alternative conception of rights is clearly the correct one: for it alone insures that all the necessary material conditions for having a reasonable chance of living a meaningful life will be met. [Scheffler, in Reading Nozick, p. 158-9]