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I think Lomasky is interesting. He doesn't try to prove that people have rights in the same way as Gewirth. Gewirth thinks that he can show that we are guilty of a logical contradiction if we deny that people have strong individual rights. I don't think that's true. But Lomasky only tries to show that rational people would (or might?) gradually construct a system of rights because it is in everyone's interest to do so.

My problem with Lomasky arises when he tries to show that the system of rights that prudent people would adopt is a libertarian system. In his words, it is the system that would require that we give minimal deference to others. His argument is that the minimal deference system would be the most stable. Here's what he tells us:

[A] stable regime of equal rights for all requires that the amount of required deference be close to the level of deference ideal for the least deferential members of the community. [Lomasky, p. 82, brackets added, italics in original]

I'm not at all sure that is true. It might be less stable than some of the alternatives precisely because it defers so little to others. My own thinking is that the most stable combination of freedom and deference might be somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. There may be lots of people who reject this minimal deference regime because they have a different vision of an ideal society -- one in which there is more of a sense of corporate responsibility. And there may be lots of people who do badly in this minimal deference society and are angry because it offers them so little. In either case, there may be plenty of discontent and, as a result, plenty of instability.

Look, when Lomasky makes a few remarks about what this minimal deference society would be like, he suggests, for example, that there would be no minimum wage laws. [Lomasky, p. 82] But it is exactly the absence of that sort of law that many people would find unacceptable and would make the situation unstable.

At the very least we can say this: Lomasky's argument depends crucially on an empirical claim about the greater stability of a libertarian system and that he has offered no empirical evidence to support it. Are we to think that a libertarian society is more stable than social democratic societies such as Sweden or Germany? I think that's very unlikely, but at the very least Lomasky must offer evidence to support his claim.