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All of you seem to believe that people have some set of moral rights, but there is no agreement about what the foundations of those rights are.

• Dee has introduced two arguments that I will call, for lack of a better term, conceptual. One is from Alan Gewirth. He argues that we are guilty of a contradiction if we deny that people have moral rights to freedom and well-being. The other argument is from Diana Meyers. She argues that we can derive four basic rights from the concept of an "adequate moral system." Dee has avoided arguments based on the principle of utility.
  
  
• Ann accepts the principle of utility and some form of "rule utilitarianism." Following John Stuart Mill and Richard Brandt, she sees rights as rules that can be justified by their long term consequences for human welfare. She believes that in individual cases rights can be invoked despite the greater utility of specific acts.
  
  
• John believes that we ascribe rights to people by a moral decision rather than by discovering or proving that people have rights. For him, the question is whether we have good reasons to ascribe rights to people; and he believes that we do. He considers the intrinsic value of people and their creative ability to carry out projects to be good reasons to ascribe rights to all. John referred to several philosophers, including Gregory Vlastos, Richard Wasserstrom, Ronald Dworkin, and James Griffin and tried to combine some of their ideas into a consistent whole. Griffin's "personhood" is the basis of "intrinsic value." Rights are created to protect that intrinsic value. John himself stressed that the construction of rights is, in the end, a moral decision on our part.
  
  
• Ayesha also believes that people have the natural right to the freedom and well-being to develop their personalities through the exercise of their capacities. But she would ultimately ground our natural rights in the will of God. She referred us to the Catholic philosophers John Ryan and Jacques Maritain. She has also stressed the common good as the basis of individual rights. Her approach does not allow the tradeoffs that utilitarianism allows.
  
  
• Fred said less than the rest of you, but he expressed an idea that is basic to the Judeo-Christian tradition; namely, that people were created in the image of God. It is that fact, he believes, that serves as the basis of their individual value and their human rights.
  

So far we have at least four different grounds or bases for human rights -- a conceptual basis, a theological basis, a welfare or utilitarian basis, and a moral decision made by human beings to defend the worth of the individual. The first two approaches try to find the basis in something independent of human attitudes and choices. The third approach, in principle, attempts to reduce the determination of rights to a scientific question about the consequences of adopting certain rules. The last approach places the basis squarely in our lap. On this last approach rights are our creation.

You disagree with each other, and yet I get the impression that you all think that people are special, that people have value, that their freedom and well-being is important, and that rights are a way of protecting that value and guaranteeing that freedom and well-being. So at least we agree on something.

I also want to point out that several of you seem to be trying to identify the fact about human beings that makes them valuable and makes them a fitting possessor of moral rights. For John it may be Griffin's personhood. For Fred it is the Biblical image of god. For Ayesha it may be Maritain's direct relationship to God. If we can identify that fact, then at least we have clarified and simplified our view of human rights. At least we know what it is about people that leads us to claim rights on their behalf. That may be quite helpful in some ways. It may help us to determine what rights people have, or to determine the limits on some rights. It may also help us to decide whether other creatures such as whales have rights. It is not without consequences.

But I want you to consider another possible foundation for rights and see if it can help you to agree on something more. In the last 40 years there has been a lot of work done on social contract theory. Rawls used a hypothetical contract for his principles of justice. Loren Lomasky, Jan Narveson, and David Gauthier have also based rights on a hypothetical contract.

I notice that none of you have mentioned the contractarian approach.
Does it help to resolve any of your differences?
Could there be a contractual basis for human rights?