Comments on Professor Card's Critique

Extract

Professor Card is not disposed to object to the main argument of my paper, which was intended to reply to Professor Lyons’ suggestion that a utilitarian cannot explain how legal rights have moral force, and at the same time to urge that the particular form of utilitarianism espoused by Professor Hare in his recent work does seem to be open to the difficulty Professor Lyons alleges. Professor Card says she is ‘not dissatisfied’ with this reasoning. I suspect that Card views my criticism of Professors Lyons and Hare as part of an in-house squabble among philosophers all of whom have utilitarian leanings of one sort or another; and she is not disposed to intervene in this. She does, however, have serious reservations about utilitarian views of rights in general, and about mine in particular; her paper consists almost entirely of her statement of these reservations. I find her remarks very welcome, since they express some objections which may be widely felt, and a response to which may therefore contribute to philosophers’ thinking about these issues.