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  Vera Speaking

Speaker I just have to say something here. It seems to me that there is a real irony in what Dee and Ann are saying. Dee is a libertarian rights theorist and Ann is a utilitarian. They propose radically different views of morality and they offer radically different moral principles. But in one respect their theories lead to the same counterintuitive conclusion. H.L.A. Hart made the point in a very fine paper of his called "Between Utility and Rights":

It is a paradoxical feature of Nozick's argument, hostile though it is to any form of utilitarianism, that it yields a result identical with one of the least acceptable conclusions of an unqualified maximising utilitarianism, namely that given certain conditions there is nothing to choose between a society where few enjoy great happiness and very many very little, and a society where happiness is more equally spread. For the utilitarian the condition is that in both societies either aggregate or average welfare is the same. For Nozick the condition is a historical one: that the patterns of distribution of wealth which exist at any time in a society should have come about through exercise of the rights and power of acquisition and voluntary transfer included in ownership and without any violation of the few basic rights. Given the satisfaction of this historical condition, how people fare under the resulting patterns of distribution, whether grossly inegalitarian or egalitarian, is of no moral significance. The only virtue of social institutions on this view is that they protect the few basic rights, and their only vice is failure to do this. [Hart, "Between Utility and Rights," Columbia Law Review, Vol. 79, No. 5 (Jun., 1979). p. 833]

The point is that both utilitarians and libertarians like Nozick have a strange blindness to the consequences of their theories. The utilitarian cannot see that maximizing welfare may at times allow one group of people to be ruthlessly exploited for the sake of others. The libertarian cannot see that very strong individual rights may make it impossible to do things that would greatly benefit many people. I think that this will become even more clear when we discuss the libertarian view of property rights.







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