Rights

I have been discussing moral issues largely from the standpoint of someone who has to decide what to do. So I have been focusing on the question of what principles we should use in making these deci­sions.

What it leaves out of account is the fact that we think of people as having rights that should be respected, as well as having the capacity for happiness, pleasure, and pain. Respect for a person's autonomy, which explained why the prisoner's feelings mattered, derives from the view that he has a right to that respect. And it is respect for autonomy that also explains why many people believe that euthanasia is sometimes morally right in cases where a rational person has asked to be killed.

The notion of a right is thus central to much of our moral thinking. Recently moral philosophers have clarified the nature and status of rights a good deal. The term “right” is used in two main sorts of cases. In the first sort of case, which involves what we call “negative rights,” I have a right to do something if I am morally free to do it, and other people have the obligation not to hinder me if I do choose to do it. This is the sense in which we speak of the right of free speech. When we say that people have a right to speak freely, we mean not only that they may do so, but also that it would be wrong to stop them.

On the other hand, we also speak of rights where people have not only a negative obligation not to hinder me in doing something but a positive duty to help me.

Each kind of right entails corresponding duties. Sometimes, especially with positive rights, these are duties for specific people: children have the right to be fed and clothed by their parents or guardians. Sometimes, and especially with negative rights, these duties are duties for everyone. Everybody is obliged not to hinder me in the free expression of my opinions.

Once we reject consequentialism as the basis for morality, it is natural to start thinking about rights, just because, where a right imposes a duty upon us, we cannot ignore that duty and look simply to the consequences of our actions. Because the prisoner had a right to have his autonomy respected, we could not kill him, even though we thought that he would be much better off dead. His autonomy requires us positively to take into account what he says.

Many people would claim that there is a much more basic bar to killing this prisoner. They would say that people have a right to life, a negative right that creates a corresponding duty in all of us not to kill them. Such people are absolutists about killing. They would say that this is the basis of the widespread belief, with which I started the chapter, that

K: Killing innocent people is wrong.

You will recall from my discussion of Theresa, the absolutist about lying, that the fact that an absolutist thinks something is wrong does not mean that she will never think she ought, all things considered, to do it. So my argument about the airman need not worry an abso­lutist who thinks that people have a right to life.

Because rights and duties can conflict in this way, we will need to know not only what rights and duties there are, but also which ones are most important. And, just as the utilitarians faced problems with measuring utility in order to find a common currency for trading one person's happiness against another's, so rights theorists face problems in finding a way of adjudicating between competing rights and duties. These issues are complex, but they reflect the complexity of our moral lives, and they are central to the philosophical consideration of moral­ity. In the next two chapters I will consider some more specific rights and duties, in the context of political philosophy and the philosophy of law. We shall see that in politics and law consequentialism does not fit with our basic conceptions of right and wrong.

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