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Utility and the Basis of Moral Rights: A Reply to Professor Brandt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

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University of Wisconsin - Madison
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Extract

Is it true that utilitarianism can accommodate the modern belief that human beings have certain moral rights against everybody ‘just in virtue of their human nature?’ I should have thought the most a utilitarian could grant was that we had rights just in virtue of the utility of respecting such rights, not just in virtue of our human nature. In fact, that is more like the view Professor Brandt actually supports. What he argues is that there is not the a priori difficulty with the idea of utilitarian moral rights that some philosophers have thought there was. However, I think the possibility of utilitarian moral rights is not the same as the view that we all have human rights against everybody just in virtue of our human nature. As I hear it, ‘just in virtue of our human nature’ is an alternative to a utilitarian basis for rights. I'll return to that.

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Reply
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , March 1984 , pp. 21 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1984

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References

1 Brandt, R.B. ‘Utilitarianism and Moral Rights,’ this issue, 1–19Google Scholar

2 E.g., David Lyons ‘Utility as a Possible Ground of Rights,’ Nous, 14 (1980) 17–28Google Scholar, to which Professor Brandt responds.

3 Brandt, ‘Utilitarianism and Moral Rights,’ 3Google Scholar

4 Brandt, R.B. A Theory of the Good and the Right (New York: Oxford University Press 1979), 194-5Google Scholar

5 Brandt, ‘Utilitarianism and Moral Rights,’ 4Google Scholar

6 Ibid., 2-3

7 Hohfeld, Wesley Newcomb Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, ed. Cook, Walter Wheeler (New Haven: Yale University Press 1964), 35–50Google Scholar

8 Golding, Martin P. ‘Toward a Theory of Human Rights,’ The Monist, 52 (1968) 521-49CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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15 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Chap. 3, ‘Of Individuality, As One of the Elements of Well-Being,’ par. 4: ‘It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it.’ Cf. par. 14: ‘If a person possesses any tolerable amount of common sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode.’

16 Brandt, ‘Utilitarianism and Moral Rights,’ 17. Hare, R.M. Moral Thinking (New York: Oxford University Press 1982) 132-64Google Scholar

17 Presented to the American Philosophical Association Western Division Meetings, April 1978, at Cincinnati, Ohio

18 E.N. 1155a, based on translation by W.O. Ross (New York: Oxford University Press 1925)