From Moral Duties to Moral Rights

Abstract

This chapter develops a teleological account of individual rights, taking Joseph Raz’s influential but problematic view as the point of departure. It is argued that an individual’s moral rights emerge from the duties that are owed to him in virtue of his interests. The chapter discusses four features an individual’s interest must have in order to ground a duty that can be justifiably enforced. The relationship between each of these features and some essential aspect of the duty grounded by the interests is explored in detail. Moral rights are in turn grounded on the presence of enforceable moral duties. The place of the virtues within the theory of moral duties and rights is also discussed, as is the compatibility between the theory of moral duty and Jonathan Dancy’s moral particularism. This discussion provides an opportunity to complete the account of personal autonomy by describing a way to formalize Dancy’s theory of ethical deliberation—the last type of rational deliberation crucial to autonomy. This account of ethical deliberation is then integrated with the accounts of instrumental and ends-deliberation to provide a unified view of the rational dimension of autonomy. The chapter concludes with a defense of the theory’s various commitments against the view that morality is an evolved system of social rules, a discussion which relies on a number of results in evolutionary anthropology.