Deeper Foundations? (John Speaking)
		Comment		Source		MAIN PATH: Dee
							Dee

I've been reading some of John Rawls lately. Rawls says that utilitarianism looks only at the aggregate and ignores the individual. His own view is a form of social contract theory. He identifies basic rights as the rights that a group of rational individuals would adopt if they know only the general features of human nature and society but not the particular position they would occupy in society. In other words, fundamental rights are the rights we would establish for all if we did not have any way of adopting rules that would favor ourselves.

Robert Ladenson has argued that we can give just this kind of a basis to a broad right to free expression. After all, if we didn't know what position we would occupy in society, wouldn't we support a right to freely believe and express ideas? We might turn out to be a member of a minority religion or a small political group, and it would be in our interest to have a right to free expression.

I think that Rawls and Ladenson are interesting and plausible, but I haven't decided whether I accept their view. They show us one way in which a right to free speech can be developed within a contractarian approach to political philosophy. If correct, it gives us a way to defend individuals against the aggregate calculations of utilitarianism.

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