View Of Rights Research Articles

Reply to Fulda on animal rights

Joseph Fulda has proposed a somewhat recherchd reply to my criticism of the doctrine of "animal rights. ''I It is always permissible to kill any number of animals rather than let a human being die, not because animals lack rights, says Fulda, but because the rights of animals are denumerably infinite in size while human rights are non-denumerable. (Fulda mistakenly asserts that R I is the number of sets of integers; this assertion is the famous Continuum Hypothesis, which is neither provable nor refutable within standard set theory.) Since any non-denumable exceeds any finite number of denumerables, animal rights may be supposed to exist but are infinitesmal compared to human rights. I am not sure that Fulda's "non-standard-moder' differs much from the common-sense view I endorsed, for reasons that a few preliminary points make clear. First, Fulda's terrorist example does not compel a non-additive view of rights, since, as is a commonplace in the literature, handing over a hostage to a terrorist is doing something wrong, whereas refusing to hand over the hostage is allowing a wrong to happen. Perhaps the governing intuition is not that killing one person is as bad as killing a thousand, but that, standing finn, you have killed nobody while all the moral blood is on the terrorist's hands. Maimonides notwithstanding, most people would chose actively taking one life over actively taking ten million, implicitly treating the value of lives as additive. Fulda's second motive for his model, the supremacy of animal rights over property rights, is also not compelling. If millions of termites are destroying my house, am I not allowed, morally, to kill them? If a wolf is decimating a flock of sheep and mining a rancher's livelihood, isn't the rancher allowed to kill it? If a limit exists to the destruction the rancher must endure, animal rights in Fulda's scheme become finite numbers considerably smaller than most property rights. Third, Fulda's model solves the central man 2 - vs. - animal problem only if the universe is sufficiently small. Suppose you are the quartermaster

Individual Rights Revisited

Since Amartya Sen's contribution on the impossibility of a Paretian liberal, his formulation of libertarian rights has been under debate. In this paper, the authors highlight some important strands in this debate, and achieve some conceptual clarification of the different and often incompatible views of individual rights. They demonstrate in terms of a counterexample and general reasoning that Sen's concept can, more often than not, be inconsistent with our intuitive view of rights and fails to capture important categories of rights. An alternative formulation in terms of game form is introduced and its relative merit vis-a-vis Sen's formulation is discussed. Copyright 1992 by The London School of Economics and Political Science.

Comments on Professor Card's Critique

Professor Card is not disposed to object to the main argument of my paper, which was intended to reply to Professor Lyons’ suggestion that a utilitarian cannot explain how legal rights have moral force, and at the same time to urge that the particular form of utilitarianism espoused by Professor Hare in his recent work does seem to be open to the difficulty Professor Lyons alleges. Professor Card says she is ‘not dissatisfied’ with this reasoning. I suspect that Card views my criticism of Professors Lyons and Hare as part of an in-house squabble among philosophers all of whom have utilitarian leanings of one sort or another; and she is not disposed to intervene in this. She does, however, have serious reservations about utilitarian views of rights in general, and about mine in particular; her paper consists almost entirely of her statement of these reservations. I find her remarks very welcome, since they express some objections which may be widely felt, and a response to which may therefore contribute to philosophers’ thinking about these issues.

Speciesism and Equality

Professor Bonnie Steinbock (Philosophy, April 1978, 249–250) writes ‘… I am not going to discuss rights, important as the issue is’; but she adds, en passant, ‘According to the view of rights held by H. L. A. Hart and S. I. Benn, infants do not have rights, nor do the mentally defective, nor do the insane, in so far as they all lack certain minimal conceptual capabilities for having rights’.

Abuse of Rights

The theory of the abuse of rights is one which has been rejected by our law, with the result that the ancient brocard ‘dura lex sed lex’ finds its most vivid illustration in the present-day decisions of the Anglo-American Courts. The absolutist view of rights which is a feature of the Common Law was summed up by Lord Macnaghten in trenchant language when he said in Mayor of Bradford v. Pickles that although Mr. Pickles's conduct in wilfully depriving his fellow townsmen of part of their water supply might be ‘shocking to a moral philosopher’ there was nothing in the law of England which could stop him from being as ‘churlish, selfish and grasping’ as it was possible for a man to be. In other words our law has not hesitated to place the seal of its approval upon a theory of the extent of individual rights which can only be described as the consecration of the spirit of unrestricted egoism.