Naturalism in Ethics and Biology

Abstract

tions (my class of rights). What this means is that whatever the moral law says, it cannot oblige him. But if this suggests that such a person never could be obliged, it is misleading. He may become sane again and so subject to the moral law. In such an event, however, his freedom from obligation has not been terminated by a new moral edict; it has been removed by a change of circumstances-the validating condition of sanity has now been satisfied in his case. In a similar way, when it is said that, in Hobbes, a man cannot be obliged to abandon his life, this does not hinder the possibility that human nature could change or could have been different, so that men could then sometimes have a sufficient motive to abandon their lives. It may assist the reader to note that in my book I am writing in a general thesis about rights, which can be summarised as follows: philosophically, rights-language is bad language. Rights in my sense (1) are better described in the (other people's) duty-language; rights in my sense (2) are better described in the validating-conditions-ofobligation language.' For the analysis of Hobbes's theory, the main disadvantage of Mr Raphael's classification of rights is that it arrests the problem at a trivial point, and lets slip entirely the significance of the conditions of the possibility of obligation (the validating conditions of obligation). The outcome is that I define 'rights' in my sense (2) in a way that corresponds with a sub-class of Mr Raphael's rights of action, namely the inalienable rights of action. Now what I say about rights and duties having separate theories is true of the rights that I define. One cannot deduce my rights (sense 2) or Mr Raphael's inalienable rights from the theory of duties, and Mr Raphael leaves me to make my substantial point2 again in his new terms. Such rights follow from the logical properties of obligation, as explained, to give a genuine theory of rights that is one of the most important developments of Hobbes's doctrine. The Queen's University of Belfast.