(Return to main path )

You guys have to get more creative and more down to earth.

There are views of moral rights that fall between Ann's utilitarianism and Dee's (or Nozick's) strong side constraints or individual rights. Let me introduce you to Thomas Scanlon, a philosopher who has been writing about moral philosophy for decades.

Back in the 1970s Scanlon suggested what he called a "third way" between utilitarianism and a theory like Nozick's. At that time, he described his views as "consequentialist." In his paper "Rights, Goals, and Fairness," he suggested that an argument supporting a right took roughly the following form:

(i) An empirical claim about how individuals would behave or how institutions would work in the absence of this particular assignment of rights (claim-rights, liberties, etc.).

(ii) A claim that this result would be unacceptable. This claim will be based on valuation of consequences of the sort described in section I above, taking into account also considerations of fairness and equality.

(iii) A further empirical claim about how the envisaged assignment of rights will produce a different outcome.

I think that this structure is quite practical. It starts from the real world of human problems and concludes that a specific right will solve a problem. It preserves the utilitarian notion that human interests are the basic concern of moral rules; but it also preserves the deontological notion that individuals must not be easily sacrificed in order to maximize an aggregate result.

I'm going to bring in more of Scanlon's ideas later.