Article contents
Rights Thinking
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Extract
Judgments about right are normally circumscribed and balanced by other considerations but it is possible to imagine ‘rights thinking’ as occurring without any such admixture. This pure rights thinking is characterized by several distinctive features. First, resentment, respect, and other passions of rectitude overrule sympathetic feelings of concern and compassion, love and affection. One responds simply as justice demands, never allowing extraneous factors to interfere with satisfaction of this moral ideal. Second, when claims of rights collide with personal attachments or calculations of benefit, the right systematically prevails. For example, rights thinking resists assertions presented to justify breaking promises to friends for their supposed greater good. Third, although rights entail obligations to their holders, responsibilities to others extend no further than these entailments within pure rights thinking. No general obligation of benevolence is recognized, for example, since no one in particular has a right to one's benevolence. Hence, fourth, as well as entailing moral protections for their holders and defining centres of independent agency, the perception of rights also promotes one's fundamental separateness from others.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1997
References
1 Carol, Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 28–35.Google Scholar
2 Gilligan, pp. 38, 57.
3 The sharpness of rights thinking is also expressed in a ‘logic of fairness’ (Gilligan, p. 32) according to which having a right appears to entail that it is to be honoured whatever the circumstances.Google Scholar The softer view that it does not follow logically from having a right that the object of the right must be accorded is expressed by Judith Jarvis, Thompson, The Realm of Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 120.Google Scholar
4 Cf. Onora, O'Neill, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant's Practical Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 191–192.Google Scholar The difficulty for rights thinkers is evident in Robert, Nozick'sAnarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), where in place of a duty of charity there is only the right to help the needy.Google Scholar
5 David, Lyons, ‘Utility and Rights’, in Waldron, J., ed., Theories of Rights (Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 127.Google Scholar
6 Cf. Lyons, p. 133.
7 Thus Jonathan, Dancy, ‘Caring About Justice’. Philosophy 67 (1992), 447–466, pp. 454–455.Google Scholar
8 See Jeremy, Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies,Google Scholar as excerpted in Jeremy, Waldron, Nonsense upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 68.Google Scholar
9 Compare Elizabeth, Wolgast, ‘Wrong Rights’, Hypatia, 2 (1987), 25–43, p. 39.Google Scholar
10 Austin, J. L., ‘Truth’, in Philosophical Papers (Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 85Google Scholar
11 See Hart, H. L. A., ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’, in Waldron, Theories of Rights, pp. 84-88.Google Scholar
12 Summer, L. W., The Moral Foundation of Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 1.Google Scholar
13 Roger, Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980), p. 50.Google Scholar
14 Mary Ann, Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: The Free Press, 1991), p. x.Google ScholarSince Sumner is Canadian and Scruton British, one would like a fuller account of her further perception that ‘there must be a … specifically American explanation … for the persistent absoluteness in rights talk that is still more common in the United States than elsewhere’ (p. 42).Google Scholar
15 John, Hardwig, ‘Should Women Think in Terms of Rights?’, in Feminism & Political Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 56.Google Scholar
16 Cf. Meyer, Michael J., ‘Rights Between Friends’, Journal of Philosophy 69 (1992), 467–483, p. 477 and 481.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17 Thus, Elizabeth, Wolgast, ‘Wrong Rights’, p. 37. Cf. Hardwig, p. 57.Google Scholar
18 Lawrence, Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), pp. 155, 166–167.Google Scholar
19 This point is developed in Evan, Simpson, Good Lives and Moral Education (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), pp. 151–15.Google Scholar
20 The distinction between rhetoric and substance is drawn by Alasdair, Maclntyre in ‘The Privatization of Good’, The Review of Politics, 52 (1990), 344–361, p. 349.Google Scholar
21 Cf. Joseph, Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 165.Google Scholar
22 On ‘manifesto rights’ see Joel, Feinberg, ‘The Nature and Value of Rights’, in Rights, Justice and the Bounds of Liberty (Princeton University Press, 1980).Google Scholar Short of conflating rights and needs, one can of course argue that ‘People have a right to what they need’, as claimed in the opening sentence of Evan, Simpson, ‘The Priority of Needs over Wants’, Social Theory and Practice, 9 (1982), pp. 95–112.Google Scholar
23 The Charter, of which this is Article 24, is reprinted in Peter, C. M., ed., Human Rights in Africa (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1990), pp. 103–116.Google Scholar
24 Theoretical foundations for such a view are constructed by Melinda, Vadis, ‘A First Look at the Pornography/Civil Rights Ordnance: Could Pornography Be the Subordination of Women?’, Journal of Philosophy, 84 (1987), pp. 487–511.Google Scholar
25 Cf. Parent, W. A., ‘A Second Look at Pornography and the Subordination of Women’, Journal of Philosophy, 87 (1990), 205–211, p.211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26 Charles, Taylor, ‘Atomism’, in his Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 188–189.Google Scholar
27 For a useful discussion of rights prior to the 17th century, see Brian, Tierney, ‘Origins of Natural Rights Language: Text and Contexts, 1150-1250’, History of Political Thought, 10 (1989), pp. 615–646.Google Scholar
28 Annette, Baier, Moral Prejudices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 226Google Scholar
29 Edmund, Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 120.Google Scholar
30 Compare Larmore's, Charles E. ‘praise of bureaucracy’ in Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge University Press, 1987) pp. 40–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
31 On the rule of right that is a paramount good in liberal societies see Charles, Taylor, ‘Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate’, in Rosenblum, Nancy L., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 172ff.;Google Scholar and Ronald, Dworkin, ‘Liberal Community’, California Law Review 77 (1989), 479-504.Google Scholar
32 John, Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 60–65, 150–161.Google Scholar
33 Robert, Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 164-166.Google Scholar
34 For one account of this general type see Sterba, James P., ‘From Liberty to Welfare’, Ethics 105 (1994), pp. 64–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
35 Flathman, Richard E., The Practice of Rights (Cambridge University Press, 1976). My quotations are from pages 165 and 220.Google Scholar
36 Thus Don, MacNiven asks seriously, ‘does Mars have a right to be left in its natural state?’, Creative Morality (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 203.Google ScholarKim Stanley, Robinson develops the nice irony of casting the green party as the anti-environmental party in his novel, Red Mars (New York: Bantam Books, 1993).Google Scholar
37 For another statement of the sufficiency of a practice-view see Dworkin, , ‘Liberal Community’.Google Scholar
38 Thus Baier, , Moral Prejudices, pp. 238-239.Google Scholar
39 Iris Marion, Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 41 and p. 163.Google Scholar
40 For a clear statement of the idea that the general advantage may be promoted by the existence of privileged strata, see John, Rawls's explication of democratic equality in A Theory of Justice, pp. 75-83.Google Scholar
41 Cf. the characterization of group rights by Iris, Young in Justice and the Politics of Difference, pp. 182-186.Google Scholar
42 The freedom of each generation to determine its future for itself is an idea that runs through rights thinkers from Thomas, Paine, in The Rights of Man,Google Scholar to Jürgen, Habermas, in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed by Amy, Gutmann (Princeton University Press, 1994), pp.130–131.Google Scholar
43 Singer, Beth J., Operative Rights (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. xiii-xv.Google Scholar
44 Ibid. pp. 62, 97.
45 Jürgen, Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 202.Google Scholar
- 3
- Cited by