: Many people have lamented the proliferation of human rights claims. The cure for this problem, it may be thought, would be to develop a theory that can distinguish ‘real’ from ‘supposed’ human rights. I argue, however, that the proliferation of human rights mirrors a deep problem in human rights theory itself. Contemporary theories of natural rights to welfare are historical descendants from a theory of rights to subsistence which was developed in twelfth-century Europe. According to this theory, each human (...) being has a special role to fulfil in God's plan and therefore has inalienable rights to subsist. Later theories have secularized this idea by claiming that human beings are purposive agents. Secularization, however, comes at a price. In the case of these theories, the price is a failure to provide satisfactory answers to the most basic questions we would expect of a theory of natural rights to answer. They have failed to provide a basis for ascribing these rights to all and only to human beings. They have not been able to generate a clear and viable criterion for ascribing duties correlative to these rights. And they cannot limit rights-claims in a non-arbitrary way. Hence we should abandon these theories. (shrink)

To refuse new knowledge and new technologies is at long term a lost battle: this general constatation may, without doubt, be extrapolated to genetic engineering.The influence fundamental science-applied science is always mutual. Such as is also the influence science-society. If the genetics influences the society, the society influences the genetics and the sciences of the reproduction. The goal is indeed nowadays to have a limited number of children, and to offer a life of quality with minimal sufferings. Without doubt these (...) social “norms” have indeed also an eugenetic effect. The interaction science-society appears at each important discovery by necessary adaptations.Before to decide what is moral and immoral, correct and false in the consequences of genetical techniques, one has to better understand the proposed applications and the signification of their results. It would be necessary that the society would develop a better information or even a biological culture.To fear that human beings would destroy the natural mechanisms, to phantasm on the fact that humans would go too far, corresponds in fact to make a scandal of his intelligence, to separate human beings from the nature, it is at the limit to want to limit humans to their animal origin. In this field, such as in others, humans do not need repressive morals: the ethically responsible choice is the choice of the publicity of knowledge. This education must help him to remain honest and free, to remove false sciences and prejudices. (shrink)

What are the main conditions that any theory of human rights should satisfy to guide action? If agents must take action for a fairer world as human rights discourse suggests, this is a crucial question to reflect upon. In this paper, I make a proposal. I argue that any theory of (moral) human rights that guides action on the basis of correlative duties must satisfy three key conditions. The first condition is focused on the specification of act-types, the second concerns (...) the distribution of correlative duties, and the third is focused on the resolution of (resolvable) conflicts of human rights. I show that this proposal has substantive implications because it implies to reject, challenge and, in some cases, resist ideas that are commonly accepted in the literature on human rights. (shrink)

Aggregation in moral philosophy calls for the summing or averaging of values or utilities as a guide to individual behavior. But morality, it is argued, needs to be individualistic, in view of the evident separateness of persons, especially given the great disparities among individuals who nevertheless interact with each other in social life. The most plausible general moral program is the classical liberal (or “libertarian”) one calling for mutual noninterference rather than treating others as equal to oneself in point of (...) demands on our action. Why, then, would we ever aggregate? The reason is that we are affected by behavior that has general effects, especially unintended side effects, on all sorts of people among whom we ourselves are often to be found. When we are randomly situated among such groups—as we sometimes are and often are not—minimizing aggregate harm is the plausible strategy, and sometimes promoting aggregate benefit as well. (shrink)

1. INTRODUCTION Professor Dworkin's writings on moral and political subjects have never failed to interest me in the past, and the two-part article “What is Equality” which is the subject of this paper, is no exception. Its wealth of relevant distinctions is bound to be useful to every serious student of the subject, whatever – or, in view of the range of opinions on these matters now current, perhaps I should say almost whatever – his ideological proclivities, and whether or (...) not he is sympathetic to Dworkin's position. The present treatment will be devoted, needless to say, primarily to disagreements, criticisms, and the raising of further questions, most of them designed to call in question either the general idea that equality should be regarded as a legitimate and important goal of social institutions or Dworkin's particular formulations of that equality. This largely negative-seeming consideration, I need scarcely add, is not intended to discount or detract from the positive contributions of Dworkin's work, which are very substantial indeed. It's just that having been ably set forth by Dworkin himself, they scarcely need seconding from this source. (shrink)

Jeffrey Friedman broaches a number of criticisms of Libertarianism as a conceptual basis for opposing the extensive modern welfare state, examining several variants and concluding that they are fundamentally unsupported. He opts for a “consequentialist” view of foundations. Nevertheless, he thinks that the modem welfare state is subject to effective critique along such lines. But rational contractarian individualism works and does provide foundations for libertarianism, while “consequentialism” is an ill‐defined theory.that is quite unpromising for the proposed critique; nevertheless, Friedman's empirical (...) and economic critique of the welfare state is valid. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show how some of the controversial questions concerning utilitarianism can be clarified by the modelling techniques and the other analytical tools of decision theory (and, sometimes, of game theory). It is suggested that the moral rules of utilitarian ethics have a logical status similar to that of the normative rules (theorems) of such formal normative disciplines as decision theory and game theory.The paper argues that social utility should be defined, not in hedonistic or (...) in ideal-utilitarian terms, but rather in terms of individual preferences, in accordance with the author's equiprobability model of moral value judgments. (shrink)

Social scientists could learn some useful things from philosophy. Here I shall discuss what I take to be one such thing: a better understanding of the concept of utility. There are several reasons why a better understanding may be useful. First, this concept is commonly found in the writings of social scientists, especially economists. Second, utility is the main ingredient in utilitarianism, a perspective on morality that, traditionally, has been very influential among social scientists. Third, and most important, with a (...) better understanding of utility comes, as I shall try to show here, a better understanding of “personal welfare”. or, in other words, of what may be said to be in people's best interests. Such an understanding is useful to social scientists and philosophers alike, whether for utilitarian purposes or not. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill's commitment to liberty and individual development is one of the most exoteric themes of his moral and political philosophy. But the linkages between this commitment to liberty and development and Mill's conception of utility and principles of the good are not as commonly recognized. As part of a more general transformation of his utilitarianism, Mill repudiated Bentham's principles of the good and instead adopted a more sophisticated form of hedonism. While Bentham admits only the total quantity of (...) pleasure as contributing to value, Mill expands the circle to admit quality or kind of pleasure as well into the value reckoning. I have elsewhere interpreted and defended Mill's qualitative hedonism, and in this paper I can offer only a brief overview of that account and must largely assume its plausibility. Bentham and Mill agree that only pleasurable experiences and the absence of painful experiences have value and so both are called hedonists. But they have very different views about what properties of pleasures makes them valuable, or in other words what are the good-making properties of pleasure. Bentham thinks that only intensity and duration, or quantity, are good-making properties of pleasures, and thus he includes only these properties in measuring value. As a consequence, in the context of value measurement he is not interested in the kinds of things in which people take pleasure. But Mill is a qualitative hedonist, and thinks that the quality or kind of pleasure is also a good-making characteristic and thus should be included in value measurement. The things that are sources of pleasure matter to Mill. (shrink)

The classical conception of rhetoric as the method of reasoned political judgment survived into the Renaissance but was reduced to academic critiques of style and "empty" public rhetoric with the rise of modern science and its representationalist theories of language. Recently, however, rhetoric, textuality, and the "linguistic turn" generally, have become central metaphors in the human sciences. This renewed rhetorical perspective not only fosters a critique of positive philosophy and of scientism in public discourse, it also offers affirmative methods by (...) which persons can construct their civic lives. (shrink)

According to G. E. Moore, moral expertise requires abilities of several kinds: the ability to factor judgments of right and wrong into (a) judgments of good and bad and (b) judgments of cause and effect, (2) the ability to use intuition to make the requisite judgments of good and bad, and (3) the ability to use empirical investigation to make the requisite judgments of cause and effect. Moore’s conception of moral expertise is thus extremely demanding, but he supplements it with (...) some very simple practical guidance. (shrink)

Kant's reasoning in his special metaphysics of nature is often opaque, and the character of his a priori foundation for Newtonian science is the subject of some controversy. Recent literature on the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science has fallen well short of consensus on the aims and reasoning in the work. Various of the doctrines and even the character of the reasoning in the Metaphysical Foundations have been taken to present insuperable obstacles to accepting Kant's claim to ground Newtonian science. (...) Gordon Brittan and Gerd Buchdahl, amongst others, have argued that Kant's stated aims in this case are not to be taken at face value, and that prior ontological commitments play a hidden but central role in Kant's special metaphysics. ;Michael Friedman has shown how Kant's stated aims can be taken seriously with his ingenious reconstruction of the Metaphysical Foundations as a demonstration of the a priori basis for our thinking bodies to be in true motion and in absolute space. However, Friedman does not address the issue of matter theory--despite the importance of the issue to Kant. I argue that a strict reading of both the stated aims and doctrines of the Metaphysical Foundations is possible, since much of Kant's reasoning about the empirical concept of matter can be explained by his views on how the construction of empirical concepts is possible. ;Kant's quasi-mathematical constructions are pivotal in Friedman's interpretation. Constructibility is Kant's criterion of acceptability for the concepts of natural science. Yet Kant notoriously fails to construct the dynamical concept of matter, and accepts this failure with an equally notorious complacency. I argue that Kant's criteria of empirical concept construction, apart from any prior ontological commitments, are enough to generate his views on matter. Kant's failure to construct the requisite concept of matter can be ascribed to a missing law of nature, a law of the relation of forces the discovery of which Kant thought imminent. I conclude that matter theory is central to the Metaphysical Foundations, but that this does not undermine Kant's stated aim of giving the a priori ground of Newtonian science. (shrink)

In the evolution of the vertebrates and probably a few other animals (Metazoa), biological values have been translated (subjectivized) into affective experience that necessarily involves the consciousness of external objects/events (as different from one’s body), which is tantamount to the origins of subjectivity. Mammals, birds and other vertebrates are experiencing subjects even though their negative and positive experience greatly vary in scope. Some mammals are capable of vicarious experience and may act as empathic agents, and some of them, at least (...) the great apes, use true reflective self-consciousness and thus perceive themselves as agents, which generates attributive feelings. The balance of positive and negative experience determines the intrinsic value of (an individual) life. Every subjective life is autotelic in striving to maximize this balance. A subjective life may also have a social value that is measured in terms of the impact on intrinsic values of other lives. The social value of life is contingent upon an agency, that is, conscious intentional actions that impact intrinsic value of other lives. The difference between the social value of a subjective life and an instrumental value of an individual comes down to the difference between agent causation and event causation. The moral agency refers to a subcategory of agent causation that involves the awareness of impact on another subject’s wellbeing (interests). The moral agency is at present known only in the hominids (including the chimpanzees) which understand causality and use reflective self-consciousness, which in turn enables them to perceive themselves as agents and attribute to themselves responsibility. The moral agency originated as a motivational mechanism of reciprocity execution , and thus as an adaptation for group life, which is why it favors ingroup members and often promotes norms that harm other groups. The human moral agency is frequently used by third parties to implement group norms that are based on ideologies (religious or secular) and may actually harm both group members and the entire groups. Any received, bioculturally evolved morality is unlikely to be good in either absolute or universal sense. Therefore, the moral capacity alone does not make a human life categorically more valuable, even if human motivation were dominated by moral agency (which is true only of some people). The life of a vertebrate has, therefore, two values, intrinsic and social. Each can be negative or positive, and may vary to a large extent independently of the other, whereby a joint value of a subjective life cannot be sensibly assessed and compared without prior assessments of the intrinsic and social component separately. In the absence of objective reasons to rate the intrinsic value of a human life as categorically higher than that of other mentally advanced mammals, and in consideration of the observed range of social values of human lives, some of which approach zero and some are highly negative (lower than any thinkable negative values of non-human lives), the doctrine of extraordinary and inalienable (innate) human „dignity” is groundless and unethical, as it leads to a depreciation of the lives of non-human subjects, and often preempts the need to impart a real social value to one’s own life. (shrink)

One of the core issues in contemporary political philosophy is concerned with `political obligation.' Stated in an overly simplified way, the question being asked when one investigates political obligation is, "What, if anything, do citizens owe to their government and how are these obligations generated if they do exist?" The majority of political philosophers investigating this issue agree that a political obligation is a moral requirement to act in certain ways concerning political matters. Despite this agreement about the general nature (...) of what is being searched for, a broad division has arisen between political obligation theorists - there are some who take political obligations to actually exist and there are some who take there to be no general political obligation. While there is debate within the camp defending political obligation about what it is that generates the obligations, the common core of all "defender theories" is the fundamental idea that one has a moral requirement to support and obey the political institutions of one's country. Despite utilitarianism's status as one of the major ethical theories, historically, it has largely been dismissed by theorists concerned with political obligation. Within the contemporary debate it is generally accepted that utilitarianism cannot adequately accommodate a robust theory of political obligation. The overarching objective of this dissertation is to challenge this general dismissal of a utilitarian account and to build upon the two accounts which have been developed in offering a robust utilitarian theory of political obligation which can be considered a competitor to the other contemporary theories. However, as this utilitarian account of political obligation develops, the possibility will also emerge for a non-antagonistic relationship between the utilitarian theory on offer and the contemporary political obligation debate. The moral reasons posited by the traditional theories of political obligation can be included in and accommodated by my utilitarian account. The utilitarian account of political obligation can accept that there are many types of reasons explaining why broad expectations concerning individual and group behavior are created, and each type of reason can be understood as supporting the utilitarian claim that there are moral reasons for following the laws and supporting legitimate political authorities. Taken all together, my arguments will take the form of a three tiered response to the prevailing opinion that any utilitarian attempt to account for political obligations is doomed. The first tier contends that the utilitarian can consistently claim that there are moral reasons to follow the law. This is not a particularly strong claim, but it is one which has been denied by the vast majority of political theorists. The second tier of my argument addresses this apparent issue by contending that even the traditional deontological accounts of political obligation are not offering more than this. Lastly, it is contended that, given the contingent features of humans, the strength of the utilitarian political obligations is comparable to other accounts' analyses of the obligations. (shrink)