Abstract
Kant formulates the question “What ought I do?” as an agent’s question. This is not the only way in which practical reasoning can be approached. A great deal of contemporary work in ethics and political philosophy addresses different, often narrower, questions. Much of it focuses primarily on recipients rather than agents, and so on entitlements or rights rather than on requirements or duties to act, including most obviously discussions of human rights. I will consider some of the consequences and the advantages of starting from each of these questions, and some of the ways in which each shapes practical reasoning.
Highlights
An even larger range of contemporary discussions of standards of justice—including paradigmatically the vast range of discussions of Human Rights—prioritize the ‘recipient’s perspective’, by focusing in the first place on those aspects of justice that individuals can claim as their rights
Human Rights approaches to justice take a narrower view of its scope than either Kantian or Rawlsian approaches
Rawls takes a very different approach to the justification of standards of justice. His political philosophy is in some ways deeply Kantian, both in A Theory of Justice and in Political Liberalism and other later work, Rawls develops a line of argument that differs fundamentally from Kant’s
Summary
An even larger range of contemporary discussions of standards of justice—including paradigmatically the vast range of discussions of Human Rights—prioritize the ‘recipient’s perspective’, by focusing in the first place on those aspects of justice that individuals can claim as their rights Each of these approaches addresses practical or normative questions about standards that matter, but many other discussions set aside practical or normative questions and take a ‘third party’ or ‘spectator’ view of ethics. This is no doubt appropriate for historical, sociological and cultural studies, but it evades questions about the normative justification of the (supposed) values discussed, sometimes suggesting that there is an element of justification to be found in the mere fact (when it is a fact) that they reflect individual choices or preferences, or culturally entrenched positions This sleight of hand is often apparent in appeals to ‘my values’ or ‘our values’ (or ‘my’ or ‘our’ principles or preferences), as if this could constitute justification. I begin by considering the broadest and most inclusive approaches, and turn to positions that take narrower views of the basic questions, and of the range of normative claims
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