Are there Absolute Rights?

Abstract

During the discussion of natural rights-talk in Chapters 1 to 5, it was argued that claims to an absolute status do not survive scrutiny. Moreover, a main conclusion was that such rights-talk, trading on the legal paradigm’s connotations of stability and security, tends to obscure the conditionality of a putative natural right upon a range of moral considerations. Further, John Finnis’s absolute rights were judged to be either not natural, or too abstract and unspecified to be practically illuminating. This chapter returns to the topic, to consider whether, and how, it can make good sense to talk of absolute rights—that is, rights against kinds of action wrong per se, which must therefore be always granted and never suspended, regardless of the circumstances, especially the consequences. Since the right against torture is the paradigm of an absolute right, that is the focus here. The chapter concludes that there are kinds of action that are absolutely wrong by definition, and one of these is (sadistic, domineering, humiliating) ‘torture’. Therefore, there is a natural moral duty never to perform such an action. However, since there are no natural moral rights at all, there is no natural right against this. Nonetheless, there are good moral reasons of prudence why there should always be an absolute legal right against ‘torture’, so defined as to encompass all instances of non-consensual pain infliction, even though rare cases of the latter might be morally permissible. There is, therefore, at least one absolute legal right.