Ch 7: The Ethics of Rights

1. Ch 7: The Ethics of Rights Contemporary Theories

2. Rights: Initial Distinctions • Rights holders: permission to act, an entitlement • Rights observers: duty or obligation • Negative – refrain from interfering with rights holder’s exercise of the right (freedom of speech) • Positive – assist in the successful exercise of the right (housing, education, health care) • Responsibility on the part of the rights holder about how to exercise the right – right limited by harm to others.

3. Classifications of Strength • Absolute rights - cannot be overriden by other types of considerations that do not involve rights – (not to be tortured?) • Prima Facie rights – at first glance it appears applicable but may be outweighed by considerations

4. Justification of Rights • Self-evidence: seem obvious but usually an unhelpful category in settling disputes. • Divine foundations: natural rights founded in God. A source of claim against the crown and part of the deep structure of the world. Not viable for nontheists and no language of rights in religious traditions. • Natural law: natural order is fundamentally good (created by God). No basis again for nontheists. • Human nature: characteristics essential to humans confer rights

5. Human Nature and Human Rights Rights conferring properties of humans include • The fact of being born a human being • Rationality, the ability to think • Autonomy, the ability to make free choices • Sentience, the ability to feel and suffer • The ability to be a “self” or person • The ability to have projects and plans

6. Who has rights? • Future generations: we think of rights belonging only to existing individuals. • Animals: do they have rights conferring properties? Sentience, interests, free will, rationality? What rights do animals have?

7. What rights do we have? Negative Rights: • Liberty: political movements • Life: no one entitled to kill us: capital punishment, abortion, war, animal rights to life, end of life • Property: • Equality: civil rights Positive Rights • Rights to well-well being: physical security, employment, goods necessary for subsistence. • Social contract rights: belonging to particular societies at particular times – rights of persons with disabilities,

8. The Limits of Rights Talk • Nonsense on stilts – rights are moral fictions embedded in particular societies, not universal. Are rights basic or just useful for society and result of decisions about how society will be governed. • Rights emphasize isolated autonomy • Liberty – each person as an island • Privacy • Exclusive emphasis on rights distorts total vision of moral life.

9. Role of Rights in Moral Life • Minimum conditions for the flourishing of a moral community. • Check against possible abuses of human dignity – the minimum daily requirement in the nutrition metaphor. • One of several standards of value. What we minimally owe one another.