Basic Moral Rights Research Articles

Making peace in gestational conflicts.

Mary Anne Warren's claim that "there is room for only one person with full and equal rights inside a single human skin" ([1], p. 63) calls attention to the vast range of moral conflict engendered by assigning full basic moral rights to fetuses. Thereby, it serves as a goad to thinking about conflicts between pregnant women and their fetuses in a way that emphasizes relationships rather than rights. I sketch out what a 'care orientation' might suggest about resolving gestational conflicts. I also argue that the care orientation, with its commitment to the significance of the partial and the particular, cannot be absorbed within standard, impartialist moral theory.

The Structure of Normative Ethics

If you open a typical textbook on normative ethics, it will have a discussion of what it thinks of as rival theories: there might be a chapter each on, say, utilitarianism, contractarianism, and virtue theory. The assumption seems to be that these three are alternative attempts to answer the same basic questions. This seems to me exactly incorrect At least as they are ordinarily understood, these three are addressing three different concerns in normative ethics, and in principle-although almost never in practice-they are completely compatible. Failure to see this, I believe, is due to our failure to have an adequate of the structure of normative ethics. We lack an adequate account of what the various theories in normative ethics are trying to accomplish. It is not that there is nothing at all like a received view concerning the nature of normative ethics: roughly, normative ethics involves the attempt to state and defend the basic principles of morality. It is concerned with determining which actions are right, which wrong, what is permitted and what forbidden. Similarly, it might be said to treat the basic moral rights, duties, virtues, and so on. So far as it goes, there is nothing wrong with this account. But it does not go very far. It is like a map of a country which only displays its border. Such a map can serve to distinguish one country from another-as our account can help to set off normative ethics from metaethics-but it gives no significant detail about the internal features of the country. What we lack-what the received view does not give us-is a sense of the major regions of normative ethics and how they are related to one another. Lacking an adequate guide to the structure of normative ethics we can fail to recognize what we are doing when we compare and evaluate the specific normative theories that have been offered. In this essay, then, I want to try to lay out the basic outlines of a more

Commentary on workfare: Servitude or success formula?

In his article entitled “Workfare: Servitude or Success Formula?” Patrick J. Keleher Jr. discusses Project Chance, an Illinois public aid program under which refusal of an aid recipient to participate in job training and work internships can result in termination of public assistance. Despite that seemingly coercive aspect of Project Chance, Keleher defends the program as consistent with the basic moral rights of welfare recipients. In my commentary I present reasons why I am not convinced by Keleher's defense of Project Chance.

The Right to Know in the Workplace

The makers of public policy cannot avoid the deep and often strident public controversy over the nature and scope of basic moral rights. There are persuasive defenders on both sides of the issue. Forging public policy in the absence of a broad public consensus is nothing more than the arbitrary imposition by government of some preferred, but not necessarily privileged, moral view. It hardly seems the legitimate role of a democratic government, even in the name of moral leadership, to so impose views that are deeply controversial and not capable of broad-based support by the population at large. It is better by far, for reasons of stable public policy, that we seek the painful path of building a general public consensus among the well-informed and well-meaning citizenry. If no such consensus can be achieved, then the law will, as a matter of necessity, settle the issue in the interest of the efficient discharge of general social functions. . .and that is really not a particularly unfortunate outcome.

The Concept of Moral Person

El propósito de este trabajo es analizar el concepto de persona moral como portadora de derechos morales básicos. Se trata de explorar la conexión entre este concepto y la clase de los seres humanos, Muchas personas aceptan que existe una relación íntima entre el hecho de ser hombre (i.e. ser humano] y Ia propiedad de ser portador de un derecho. Bajo este punto de vista, parece que la única condición para gozar de un derecho moral es ser humano. Esta condición cumple con una aspiración igualitaria, ya que afirma que todos los hombres deben tener cualquier derecho en el mismo grado. La condición cumple con la proposición: todos los hombres son iguales. Si esta proposición se interpreta como descriptiva, es falsa. Si se interpreta normativamente, no es plausible, ya que todos los teóricos de la igualdad aceptan el hecho de que no todos los hombres deben de ser tratados como iguales. La proposición podría tener sentido si la interpretamos como una proposición analítica, es decir, si afirmamos que el predicado 'hombre' tiene carácter de todo o nada, lo que significa que todos los hombres son igualmente hombres. Estas reflexiones nos llevan a la necesidad de analizar el predicado 'hombre'. Una primera definición podría darse en relación con ciertas propiedades Biológicas; otra, de acuerdo con ciertas características tales como la racionalidad, la inteligencia o la capacided de decidir y de elegir valores. La propiedad biológica no admite grados, por esto puede decirse que tiene un carácter de todo o nada. El concepto de hombre definido en términos biológicos puede servir para propósitos teóricos y prácticos; sin embargo, no nos sirve para adscribirle al hombre ciertos derechos morales básicos. La otra definición tiene consecuencias no deseadas, ya que las caracteristicas en cuestión no son de todo o nada.' Los hombres, según esta tesis, serán merecedores de los derechos de acuerdo con el grado de racionalidad, inteligencia, capacidad de elección de valores, etc. Esta consecuencia sería elitista. Por esta razón la proposición 'todos los hombre son iguales' parece analíticamente falsa. Tenemos que rechazar la presuposición de que el concepto de persona moral denota una clase de individuos a los que distinguen ciertas propiedades fácticas mencionadas en principios morales fundamentales y que son condición para tener ciertos derechos. Necesitamos un cambio radical en la estrategia de la caracterización de la personalidad moral. Necesitamos, primero, establecer los principios básicos y categóricos de los que se deriven los derechos Morales; a saber: 1) El principio de la inviolabilidad de la persona. 2) El principio de la autonomia de la persona. 3) El principio hedonista. 4) El principio de la dignidad de la persona. El principio de la autonomía de la persona y el hedonista, establecen el valor agregado de ciertos bienes que son el contenido de los derechos básicos. Ahora bien, estos están limitados por el principio de la inviolabilidad de la persona. que prohíbe privar a alguien de un bien, si con ello se le deja. en una situación peor que la de las otras personas. Este principio, a su vez, está limitado por el principio de la dignidad de las personas, el cual habla de ciertos tipos de distribución. Cada uno de estos principios beneficia a aquellas entidades que tienen una característica distintiva. El de la autonomía de la persona sólo puede ser disfrutado por los individuos que eligen y materializan los principios morales en general. El hedonista sólo beneficia a los individuos que pueden sentir placer y dolor. El principio de inviolabilidad de las personas sólo se aplica a las que son autoconscientes, independientes y centros de interés. El de la dignidad beneficia. a las personas que son capaces de tomar decisiones y de aceptar las consecuencias de sus acciones. Para gozar de los derechos, derivados de los principios, se necesitan ciertas capacidades que son graduales y que son las condiciones que permiten a los individuos y a las entidades gozar de los beneficios de los principios liberales. Como únicamente la capacidad actualizada permite el goce, es necesario examinar dicha noción. Este examen nos remite a la noción de 'entidades existentes' que son susceptibles de tener personalidad moral. Para adscribir personalidad moral a una entidad o a un individuo, son relevantes las cuestiones de la existencia y de la identidad a través del espacio y el tiempo. Esta cuestión esta íntimamente relacionada con la de la identidad personal. Dado que el tratamiento de este tema sería demasiado largo, es mejor mencionar algunas de sus implicaciones, a manera de prólogo. Dichas implicaciones se refieren a cuestiones relacionadas con distintas clases de individuos o entidades, como son: los animales no humanos, los fetos, las personas minusválidas, las entidades colectivas y las personas pasadas y futuras.

Personal Projects as the Foundation for Basic Rights

A theory of basic moral rights ought to aim at telling us who the beings are that have rights and of what those rights consist. It may, however, seek to achieve that goal via an indirect route. In this paper I shall attempt a strategy of indirection. The first stage of the argument is a consideration of why moral theory can allow any place at all to rights. Acknowledging rights can be inconvenient. An otherwise desirable outcome is blocked if the only ways in which it can be attained involve the violation of rights. Why not jettison rights and thereby render these outcomes achievable? The answer that will be suggested trades on it being a deep fact about human beings that they can and do order their lives by reference to long-term commitments and aspirations. In my terminology, they are project pursuers. If people were rational animals all of whose interests were flickering and evanescent, an ethic entirely resting on maximization of impersonal value would be appropriate. But because projects entail commitments to values not subject to trade-offs, the introduction of rights is plausible.That is the first major stage of the argument. The second builds on it and tries to show that the recognition of rights or their equivalent is morally required, that only an ethic in which basic rights are acknowledged can be properly responsive to persons' status as project pursuers. More particularly, is suggested that rights take the form of constraints imposing minimal forbearance on others such that one has reasonable expectations of being able to pursue one's projects amidst a world of other project pursuers.

An Examination and defense of one Argument concerning Animal rights

An argument is examined and defended for extending basic moral rights to animals which assumes that humans, including infants and the severely mentally enfeebled, have such rights. It is claimed that this argument proceeds on two fronts, one critical, where proposed criteria of right‐possession are rejected, the other constructive, where proposed criteria are examined with a view to determining the most reasonable one. This form of argument is defended against the charge that it is self‐defeating, various candidates for the title, ‘most reasonable criterion of right‐possession’, are critically examined, and it is argued that this criterion is to be found in the notion of inherent value: What underlies the ascription of rights to any given x is that x has value logically independently of anyone's valuing x; thus, to treat x as if x had value only if or as it served one's interests, etc., is to violate x ‘s rights. It is argued that many animals, owing to their being subjects of a life that is more or less ...