Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T20:54:38.730Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Personal Projects as the Foundation for Basic Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Loren Lomasky
Loren Lomasky
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Minnesotaat Duluth
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

A theory of basic moral rights ought to aim at telling us who the beings are that have rights and of what those rights consist. It may, however, seek to achieve that goal via an indirect route. In this paper I shall attempt a strategy of indirection. The first stage of the argument is a consideration of why moral theory can allow any place at all to rights. Acknowledging rights can be inconvenient. An otherwise desirable outcome is blocked if the only ways in which it can be attained involve the violation of rights. Why not jettison rights and thereby render these outcomes achievable? The answer that will be suggested trades on it being a deep fact about human beings that they can and do order their lives by reference to long-term commitments and aspirations. In my terminology, they are project pursuers. If people were rational animals all of whose interests were flickering and evanescent, an ethic entirely resting on maximization of impersonal value would be appropriate. But because projects entail commitments to values not subject to trade-offs, the introduction of rights is plausible.

That is the first major stage of the argument. The second builds on it and tries to show that the recognition of rights or their equivalent is morally required, that only an ethic in which basic rights are acknowledged can be properly responsive to persons' status as project pursuers. More particularly, is suggested that rights take the form of constraints imposing minimal forbearance on others such that one has reasonable expectations of being able to pursue one's projects amidst a world of other project pursuers.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , Spring 1984 , pp. 35 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1984

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See Scanlon, Thomas, “Preference and Urgency,” Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 655–669.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a contrary position see Tooley, Michael, “Abortion and Infanticide,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (1972): 37–65Google Scholar.

2 Feinberg, Joel, “Duties, Rights and Claims,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 3 (1966) 137–144Google Scholar; and “The Nature and Value of Rights,” Journal of Value Inquiry, 4 (1970) 243–257.

3 Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), Introduction, xi.

4 Anarchy, State, and Utopia New York: Basic Books, 1974), 29.

5 A side constraint defines what is permissible within a game, practice or institution. It cannot be violated without stepping outside of that activity. Cashing out the metaphor of a trump, x can trump y but be overtrumped by z, all within the context of a particular game. So the restriction of encroachment imposed by a right taken as a side constraint is conceptually stricter than that of a right as trump (which can have a low position within an indefinitely extended hierarchy of trumps). This is borne out by a comparison of Dworkin's and Nozick's accounts of the place of rights. For Nozick rights are almost unabridgable, possibly giving way in a situation where “catastrophic moral horror” otherwise impends (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, footnote, 30). Dworkin's rights are less sturdy, how much less so not being clearly indicated. The model of side constraints is a simpler one to work with, and I shall adopt it for this paper even though that ducks the hard question of the absoluteness of moral rights.

6 For convenience sake, I shall take the standard of value as utility. That is not necessary for the argument to go through. It could instead be a proxy function for utility such as real GNP or an index of Rawlsian primary goods. Alternatively, the standard of value could respond to actions as they promote survival of the fittest members of the species, fidelity to the Categorical Imperative, or obedience to Divine commands. All that is required is that the standard be equally and impartially applied to allmoral actors.

7 A significant nonutilitarian presentation of this theme is Nagel's, ThomasThe Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

8 I avoid consideration here of problems involved with discounting over time.

9 I repeat that this need not result in utilitarianism. Any standard of value applied impartially as a test of rightness among all persons meets this formal condition.

10 “Would you accept $1 million to kill your father and sleepwith your mother?” Is the question crass and insulting because the price is too low? Because it is expressed in the wrong unit?

11 Derek Parfit has skillfully argued that less hangs on personal identity than is commonly supposed. See his “Personal Identity,” Philosophical Review 80 (1971): 3–27; “On ‘The Importance of Self-Identity’,“ Journal of Philosophy 68 (1972): 683–690. Attention to the status of projects yields a similar conclusion: self-identity understood as a passively received endowment is metaphysically shallow; the identity one forges through one's extended undertakings is metaphysically and morally rich.

12 Fried, Charles, Right and Wrong (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Emphasis added.

13 A stringent methodological principle will take a moral theory to be justified only if it meets some high standard of consistency, plausibility, theoretical economy, etc. and if, in addition, it is shown that no other theory meets a yet higher standard. A very stringent methodological principle insists on a uniqueness proof: no theory T' inconsistent with T meets a standard as high as the one T does. I have no idea how to go about showing that a theory of basic rights satisfies either of these strictures. It is an open question whether an account in which rights are entirely absent may incorporate some distinct notion that does everything rights can do (or more).

14 Nicomachean Ethics, 1111 b 26.

15 See Frankfurt, Harry, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971): 5–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 That is one reason why I think a derivation of rights from the bare fact of agency such as offered by Gewirth, Alan in Reason and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)Google Scholar must fail. It is, though, an instructive failure. If agency is too spare a foundation for the derivation of rights, agency that has more determinate content may get one further along. Project pursuit is here being offered as the candidate for flesh that ought to cover and thus vivify the bare bones of agency. See my Gewirth's Generation of Rights,” Philosophical Quarterly 31 (1981): 248–253.

17 Or, if there is no highest level but rather an infinite hierarchy, projects are those valuations such that at every higher level they are positively valued.

18 However, if apparent trickery were to become a bar to philosophical respectability, an immense amount of the tradition would be uprooted: the ontological argument, Berkeley's idealism, some contemporary strategies.

19 The Possibility of Altruism, especially Chapters XI and XII.

20 See Waldron, Jeremy, “A Right to Do Wrong,” Ethics 92 (1981): 21–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Gewirth, so argues in Reason and Morality (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

22 This is discussed in my “Harman's Moral Relativism,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 3 (1979): especially 284–289. See also Pilon, Roger, “Ordering Rights Consistently: Or What We Do and Do Not Have Rights to Do,” Georgia Law Review 13 (1979): 1171–1196Google Scholar.

23 Thomson, Judith helpfully distinguishes between infringing a right and violating a right in “Self-Defense and Rights,” The Lindley Lecture (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1977), 10Google Scholar.

24 The question is addressed, but only in a very preliminary way, in my “Being a Person – Does it Matter?” Philosophical Topics 12 (1981); 139–152.