Welfare Rights and Conflicts of Rights

The fact that welfare rights – rights to food, shelter and medical care – will conflict with one another is often taken to be good reason to exclude welfare rights from the catalogue of genuine rights. Rather than respond to this objection by pointing out that all rights conflict, welfare rights proponents need to take the conflicts objection seriously. The existence of potentially conflicting and more weighty normative considerations counts against a claim’s status as a genuine right. To think otherwise would be to threaten the peremptory force – and hence the analytical integrity – of rights. The conflicts objection is made more pressing once we have conceded that welfare rights give people entitlements to what are potentially scarce goods. I argue that welfare rights can survive the conflicts objection if, and only if, we take scarcity into account in the framing of a given welfare right. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Nuffield Political Theory Workshop in Oxford and the Canadian Philosophical Association Congress 2006 at York University. I am grateful to Adam Swift, David Miller, Idil Boran, Sarah McCallum and two anonymous referees for their comments, and to the Economic and Social Research Council for research funding.     

Rights

Liberals claim that some perceptual experiences give us immediate justification for certain perceptual beliefs. Conservatives claim that the justification that perceptual experiences give us for those perceptual beliefs is mediated by our background beliefs. In his recent paper ‘Basic Justification and the Moorean Response to the Skeptic’, Nico Silins successfully argues for a non-Moorean version of Liberalism. But Silins's defence of non-Moorean Liberalism leaves us with a puzzle: why is it that a necessary condition for our perceptual experiences to justify us in holding certain perceptual beliefs is that we have some independent justification for disbelieving various sceptical hypotheses? I argue that the best answer to this question involves commitment to Crispin Wright's version of Conservatism. In short, Wright's Conservatism is consistent with Silins's Liberalism, and the latter helps to give us grounds for accepting the former.     

Makers' Rights

This paper examines the thesis that human labor creates property rights in or from previously unowned objects by virtue of labor's power to make new things. This thesis is considered for two possible roles: first, as a thesis to which John Locke might have been committed in his writings on property; and second, as a thesis of independent plausibility that could serve as part of a defensible contemporary theory of property rights. Understanding Locke as committed to the thesis of makers' rights has seemed to many of the best known recent Locke scholars to explain and unify Locke's various claims about property in a way that more traditional labor-mixing interpretations cannot. This paper argues that there is in fact no convincing evidence in Locke's texts to suggest any commitment to the thesis of makers' rights for humans. Further, not only does a version of the traditional labor-mixing argument yield a much superior interpretation of Locke's writings, it is an argument that is far more convincing than makers' rights arguments, quite independent of its usefulness in the interpretation of Locke's theory.     

Parental Rights

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the philosophical foundations of parental rights. Some commonly held accounts are rejected. The question of whether parental rights are property rights is examined. It is argued that there are useful analogies with property rights which help us to see that the ultimate justification of parental rights lies in the special value of parenthood in human life. It is further argued that the idea of generation is essential to our understanding of parenthood as having special value and that parental rights properly belong, in the first instance, to natural parents.     

Rights Externalism

Rights externalism is the thesis that a subject's status as a rightholder is secured not on account of it having a certain nature, but on account of it being afforded a certain sort of social recognition. I believe that rights externalism has been given short shrift, largely because a certain objection is widely taken to be a compelling reason for rejecting it. This objection goes roughly as follows. Both in theory and in practice we commonly appeal to the fact that subjects possess certain nonconventional rights (independently of whether these rights have been socially recognized) to criticize immoral social practices, arrangements, and institutions. But if being a rightholder is directly determined by whether subjects have been afforded a certain sort of social recognition, then we cannot appeal to the fact that subjects possess certain nonconventional rights for critical purposes in some instances, namely, in those instances where the relevant social recognition has not been extended. Although this objection is taken by some rights internalists to justify favoring rights internalism over rights externalism, I argue that it does not.     

Welfare Rights

The article tries to qualify the contentious issue of whetherthere is a human right to welfare. Our notion of human rightsis practically without criteria for distinguishing between whenit is used correctly and when incorrectly. The first step inany satisfactory resolution of the issue about welfare rightsis to supply duly determinate criteria. I then consider thechief reasons for doubting that there is a human right towelfare, in the light of what seem to be, all things considered,the best criteria to attach to the notion of a human right.     

体现着人权诉求的消费者权益

对于传统的中国人来讲,义务与责任几乎是伦理、道德的同义词,因此,谈到消费伦理,在过去人们马上会想到勤俭节约的美德.而今天,随着公民意识的觉醒,消费者勇于维权的表现已经成为改革开放以来中国价值观念变革的一道重要景观.现在再谈及消费伦理,自然会将消费者的权益维护作为整个消费伦理阐释框架的基石与出发点.而这一消费伦理研究视角的明显变换,实际上折射出了正在迅速发生着的中国社会道德思维结构从以义务为本位到以权利为本位的巨大转型.     

人民权利:人权的一种替代方案——从毛泽东的权利思维看

在毛泽东的权利思考中,他很少使用“人权”这一概念,绝大多数时候使用的是“人民的权利”,这一细节并没有引起学界足够的重视。笔者认为,毛泽东的人民权利思想是批判性地发展西方人权理论的一种尝试。中国传统文化、马克思主义和近代中国面临的救亡危局极大地影响了毛泽东的权利思维,使他深刻地认识到西方人权理论的局限性,并进而提出了明显异质于西方人权理论的权利思想。作为西方人权思想的一种替代性方案,人民权利思想以强调阶级属性、非精英主义、集体主义和权利真实性的特质,完成了在反思以天赋人权为主要特征的西方人权基础上的一种权利建构。而由毛泽东主导的权利实践的成就和失误都可以从这些特质中找到其根源。以史为鉴、推进当前中国的人权建设无疑应当从清理这一时期的权利理论与实践开始。     

Against Posthumous Rights

A number of prominent nonconsequentialists support the thesis that we can wrong the dead by violating their moral claims. In contrast, this study suggests that the arguments offered by Thomson, Scanlon, Dworkin, Feinberg and others do not warrant posthumous rights because having claim‐grounding interests requires an entity to have the capacity to experience significance. If dead people don't have this capacity, there is no reason to attribute claims to them. Raising doubts about prominent hypothetical examples of ‘no‐effect injury’, the study concludes that nonconsequentialists should consider adopting an error theory regarding posthumous claims, and suggests two alternative explanations of the relevant moral domains.     

On Language Rights

In social and political philosophy, linguistic differences are usually seen as one item in the long and indefinite list of Cultural Differences; consequently, language rights are discussed and criticized together with other cultural rights. In this essay, it is argued that a right to use one's own language can be justified by appeal to the practical role of language in human life. The ability to communicate effectively is essential for human autonomy and well-being; thus there is no need to argue that linguistic groups, as groups, are entitled to special treatment, or that language rights are group rights. Because learning a new language is invariably a costly matter, by recognizing some languages as official languages the state (re)distributes burdens and benefits among its citizens. The task of language rights is to guarantee that these burdens are not distributed in a too unequal way.     

Rights and claims

Conclusion By way of conclusion, I have tried to show that rights do not come from nowhere, that is, rights are not sui generis. They come from claims. Rights do not make claims possible; rather claims make rights possible. For out of claims come claims to rights and from the welter of such claims to rights a legal system is established which, after sifting and refining, accepts some claims to rights and dignifies these as deeds, titles, rights and rejects others; and provides rules enabling persons to exercise their rights. A system of rights and rules thus generated gives one the right to make strong claims. Although having a right is not a condition for making a claim, having a right is necessary to sustain and appraise a claim. Appealing to rights enables us to distinguish weak from strong claims. For rights may sustain or rebut claims though they are not themselves claims.How can we appraise claims? A claim to implies a claim that, the latter being an outcome of the former. If the resulting claim is open to appraisal of the sustain/reject or true/false kind, then it is a claim in a sense other than a primitive cry in the wild. If one can go on to say of a claim that is open to appraisal that one has a right to make such a claim or that one has a strong claim, this is to give favorable, initial appraisal to a claim thus made; and is a claim not in a primitive but in a secondary and ultimately more significant sense.A slightly revised version of a paper read at the Long Island Philosophical Society, May 15, 1971. I wish to thank Lowell Kleinman, Alex Orenstein, Peter Manicas and Karsten Struhl for their helpful criticisms.     

Rights and resources

I would like to thank Arthur Kuflik, Alan Nelson, Phil Valera, Michael Fry and other participants at the Ethikon and School of International Relations at USC-sponsored conference of October, 1987 for helpful comments.     

On Disjunctive Rights

This article examines the idea of disjunctive rights—an idea first suggested by Joel Feinberg and more recently advocated by Richard Arneson. Using a hypothetical scenario to bring forward a conflict between two rights that cannot be simultaneously fulfilled, the suggestion that the conflict can be solved by describing the right‐holders as holding disjunctive rights—rights that involve, in a significant way, a disjunction—is scrutinized. Several interpretations of the idea of disjunctive rights are examined from the perspectives of the interest theory and will theory of rights. Ultimately, the idea of disjunctive rights fails to provide an acceptable solution to the problem at hand, as each interpretation has unacceptable implications. This conclusion challenges the compossibilist thesis, according to which moral rights do not, ultimately, conflict. Alternatively, if one wishes to keep the possibility of compossibility and disjunctive rights, the mainstream theories of rights must be revised or rejected.