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.     

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.     

Rights, Wrongs, and Aristotelian Egoism: Illuminating the Rights/Care Dichotomy

Since the recent work of Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, and others, it has become commonplace in moral philosophy to employ a dichotomy between an ethics of "Care" and an ethics of "Rights." Gilligan claims that men and women view moral issues in fundamentally divergent ways. Responses to moral problems tend to divide along lines emphasizing respect for rights, in the case of men, and caring for others, in the case of women. Inspired by these findings, several authors have classified moral theories in two basic camps, revolving around the injunction to care or the mandate to respect rights. While many concede that the Care and Rights perspectives are not mutually exclusive, it is increasingly common to view ethicists as forced to choose between these two types of theories.