Abstract
This chapter lays out our understanding and defense of natural rights as we have discussed elsewhere. The central idea defended is that natural rights are a function of both human nature and the nature of the political/legal order as a response to what we call “liberalism’s problem.” That response requires natural rights to be metanorms that protect the conditions that secure the possibility for self-directed conduct without specifying the objectives of such conduct.
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for the security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society and private life.
Lord Acton
Some of the material in this chapter is an adaptation, sometimes with only slight modifications, of material from Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl, Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005) [hereinafter NOL] and from Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen, The Perfectionist Turn: From Metanorms to Metaethics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016) [hereinafter TPT]. For a full account of our understanding of and argument for individual rights, see these works.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Metaphysical realism holds that (1) there are beings that exist and are what they are independent and apart from our cognition of them; and (2) we can know, though often not without great difficulty, both the existence and natures of these beings.
- 2.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Book II, chapter 2, Paragraph 6, p. 270.
- 3.
We seek to find a notion of liberty that not only solves conflicts but also is compatible with the need for human sociality and the self-directed, pluralistic character of human flourishing .
- 4.
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Book II, chapter 2, Paragraph 6, p. 271.
- 5.
Constructivism comes in both epistemic and moral forms. Epistemically, it holds that our beliefs are true only because they are based on principles that are ultimately grounded in our thoughts and practices, not on the existence and nature of things. Morally or ethically, it holds that moral claims are true or false only because they are fundamentally based on principles that are constructions of moral thought and practices, and not because they are discovered, detected, or grounded in anything real, apart from what such thought and practice define.
- 6.
Aquinas, Treatise on Law, trans. Richard J. Regan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), p. 1.
- 7.
Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. Stephen McGrade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 54. See also Henry B. Veatch, For an Ontology of Morals: A Critique of Contemporary Ethical Theory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971), pp. 123–24.
- 8.
These rights fundamentally involve, as we shall see later in this summary, protecting the possibility of self-direction among others.
- 9.
See Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl, Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1991) [hereinafter LN], pp. 78–87, for an account of the classification and characteristic of rights. See also NOL, pp. 62–75. These rights provide the moral basis for what is sometimes called “negative liberty,” but since rights are moral concepts, the negative liberty they provide is much different from “purely negative liberty,” which we criticize in our discussion of Hillel Steiner’s and Hobbes’s views below. We shall use “negative liberty” again in later chapters.
- 10.
For these rights (which would also involve rights derived from these basic rights—for example, contractual rights) to be actually operative in society, a sophisticated legal order is required, an order that certainly involves a role for social constructs—that is, custom, convention, and practices. See our discussion of this issue as it pertains to property rights in NOL, chapter 5.
- 11.
Ayn Rand, “Value and Rights,” in John Hospers, ed., Readings in Introductory Philosophical Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 381.
- 12.
See Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), chapter 2.
- 13.
Steiner claims he is moving from ordinary language and common understanding to his conception of pure negative liberty ; but while ordinary language may say things like “I am free to bash your head in,” it seldom does so in a way that confuses that use of “free” with the concept of freedom used as a general social term. However, to see how the approach taken by Steiner against a value-based understanding of freedom is developed even further, see Ian Carter, A Measure of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 173ff. It should be noted that whatever one thinks of that approach, our argument here concerns political freedom primarily as opposed to freedom per se, as is the case with Steiner and Carter.
- 14.
It might be objected that the term “free” or “freedom” in this context refers only to the agent herself and not to the relationship between the agent and others. But this is completely useless as an understanding of freedom in a social setting because our concern is inherently about the relationship and not about the individual in isolation from others. Hence, as we note below, Hobbes does not solve the problem; and any other “solution” introduces a norm of some sort which is bound to have a moral standing.
- 15.
Of course, it could be possible for there to be some ethical standard other than liberty to evaluate the situation in Hobbes’s so-called state of nature; but it is by no means clear what would be the basis for such a standard for Hobbes. For us, this issue will come down to (1) whether there can be a non-reductive naturalistic basis of ethical standards in general, as opposed to holding that such standards are simply constructions of human thought and practice; and (2) why natural rights define liberty and determine the function of the political/legal order.
- 16.
TPT, p. 146.
- 17.
The more general way of saying this is that while there are many rule-governed activities, the rules themselves are not simply the result of human constructions and practices, but instead reflect a real context in which these activities take place.
- 18.
For us, a flourishing human life is cashed out in terms of self-perfection, which we will discuss later.
- 19.
Of course, thoughts and practices often do bring about certain conduct and can provide structure to one’s life. However, the issues are which thoughts and practices ought to effect conduct and whether the structure they provide for one’s life is good for one. It is these basic issues that ethical constructivism does not meet. We discuss this problem throughout TPT.
- 20.
NOL, p. 271 (emphasis added and slightly reworded).
- 21.
This is the concern of the fourth question listed at the end of Chap. 1: “Is it the case that rights trump all other kinds of moral claims?”
- 22.
Liberty in such a life could also be described as living right. “Right” is here understood in an adjectival sense and modifies conduct that employs basic virtues.
- 23.
In this case, liberty is when people follow right. “Right” is here understood in a substantival sense and describes that to which conduct must conform—that is, the claims of natural rights to which the legal order obliges conformity. See a related discussion that pertains to metanorms in Sect. 2, “The Primacy of Rights in Political Philosophy,” below; but also see the discussion of the adjectival and substantival senses of “right” in NOL, pp. 62–75 and pp. 255–56.
- 24.
Of course, it might be the case that there can be no morally legitimate political/legal orders; but we will not pursue that issue here.
- 25.
In addition, it does not follow from the fact that R is a political regime whose legitimacy is grounded in a moral principle that, therefore, all moral principles , or even moral principles generally, are under the purview of R. See Douglas J. Den Uyl, “Response to ‘On Communitarian and Global Sources of Legitimacy’,” The Review of Politics 73, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 135–43. Finally, see our extended discussion of this issue: Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl, “Norms of Liberty: Challenges and Prospects,” in Aeon J. Skoble, ed., Reading Rasmussen and Den Uyl: Critical Essays on Norms of Liberty (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), pp. 179–86.
- 26.
A deontological theory in normative ethics holds “duty” and “right” to be basic and defines the morally good in terms of them. Such theories attempt to determine obligations apart from a consideration of the good. For Kantians, this is normally accomplished primarily by a universalizability test. A consequentialistic theory in normative ethics attempts to determine obligations simply by whether an action or rule produces the greatest net expected “good” (or least “bad”) consequences. A classic example of consequentialism is utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is a theory of obligation whose aim is neither altruistic nor egoistic, but universalistic. It can focus on acts (act-utilitarianism) or rules (rule-utilitarianism). Further, it can either require or not require calculation of the consequences by the moral agent before acting. This latter alternative can be termed “indirect” utilitarianism.
- 27.
John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971) has an alternate definition of a deontological theory as one which “does not interpret the right as the maximization of the good” (p. 30). Since our account of rights does not maximize good, then our account could be regarded as deontological in this sense. Yet, as will be explained shortly, the function of rights on our account is not concerned with the attainment of good or doing right as that is usually conceived in normative ethics. Rather, the function of rights is the protection of the possibility of self-direction or choice among others, which is not equivalent with choosing rightly.
- 28.
We discuss this point in greater detail in “The Virtue of Justice and Metanorms” in Sect. 2.
- 29.
See our discussion of condition- or framework-setting principles versus condition-seeking principles in Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen, “The Myth of Atomism,” The Review of Metaphysics 59, no. 4 (June 2006): pp. 843–70.
- 30.
Indeed, treating rights as central features, or the only features, of moral life seems to be one of the main reasons for the reluctance of some contemporary advocates of liberty to endorse natural rights. See Chap. 1.
- 31.
We discuss the nature of equinormativity further in Sect. 2 of this chapter, “The Primacy of Rights in Political Philosophy.”
- 32.
As we note later, both the utilitarian and deontological approaches to ethics tend to flatten all ethical norms into one type or function—be it for maximizing good or doing duty—and thus see moral concepts that set framework conditions for the practice of the moral life among others as being no different in kind from moral concepts that are to be employed by practitioners of the moral life among others.
- 33.
See TPT, Introduction, chapters 1, 6 and 7; and NOL, chapters 6 and 7.
- 34.
We will use “human flourishing” and “self-perfection” interchangeably. We defend this use in TPT.
- 35.
We see these dimensions as correcting in various ways certain features of more traditional perfectionist accounts of human flourishing, as well as accounts by such contemporaries as John Finnis and Alasdair MacIntyre. See Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl, “Agent Centeredness and Natural Law: Perfectionism, Immanence, and Transcendence,” in Jonathan Jacobs, ed., Reason, Religion, and Natural Law: From Plato to Spinoza (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 222–58, regarding more traditional perfectionist accounts of human flourishing. See also NOL, pp. 185–96, regarding Finnis; and pp. 225–44, regarding MacIntyre. We should also say, however, that our perfectionist account of human flourishing is inspired in part by Henry B. Veatch, Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003); and in part by David L. Norton, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976).
- 36.
NOL, chapters 6 and 7; and TPT, Introduction, chapters 1, 2, 5 and 6.
- 37.
According to an agent-neutral understanding of any reason, ranking, or value V: “if a person P1 is justified in holding V, then P2–Pn under appropriately similar conditions must hold V as well. Morally speaking, individuals or persons are interchangeable. Hence, it is impossible to weight V more heavily, or at all, simply because it is one’s own V. Such an understanding of V is sometimes called “impersonalism” and is often said to be definitive of the so-called moral point of view. According to an agent-relative understanding, by contrast, there are no V’s that are not the V’s for some person or other. V’s necessarily involve a reference to some person. Hence, the distinctive presence of V1 in world W1 is a basis or reason for P1 ranking W1 over W2, even though V1 may not be a basis or reason for any other person ranking W1 over W2. Thus, for an agent-relative conception of human good, it is possible for G1 to be the good for P1 and what P1 ought to pursue, without either being the case for P2–Pn.” TPT, pp. 34–35.
- 38.
It might be objected that even if human flourishing cannot be maximized, the utilitarian could still coherently talk about the maximizing the number of people who can flourish and thus avoid this criticism. Yet, this objection does not work, for it is not possible to increase the number of flourishers , if in concrete reality every instance of flourishing is something individualized and agent-relative and thus unique. This is not to say, however, that we cannot speak of generic goods that constitute human flourishing—for example, health, knowledge, and friendship. However, for such goods to be real, they must be individualized, which is the very thing individualistic perfectionism emphasizes and why we champion making the realist turn. Further, even if, per impossibile, human flourishing were the same in every instance, this objection would still not stand because, as we will note shortly, human flourishing is in its very essence a self-directed activity—a “do it yourself job”—and so the number of flourishers cannot increase or decrease, because the process of individuals doing it themselves makes human flourishing a unique reality. Another way of putting the point might be to say that if one discovers that under condition X, 50 people are flourishing, yet under condition Y, 60 are, there can be no inference that condition Y is “better” than X in the sense of a condition that produces more flourishers, because it is equally possible that condition Y might produce 40 flourishers the next time due to the self-directed nature of flourishing. We are open to the suggestion that certain conditions may encourage flourishing; but that is some distance from removing self-responsibility and saying those conditions caused the flourishing which, under our understanding, cannot happen unless one is speaking of self-caused. See also our reply in Chap. 4, “The Irrelevance of Natural Rights,” to an approach to rights based on indirect utilitarianism that eschews maximization.
- 39.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), 1097a34–1097b. We have replaced “happiness” in the translation with “eudaimonia.”
- 40.
See TPT, p. 38, n13. These insights are expressed in established opinions (endoxa), as well as practices, of one’s society and culture. Their cognitive worth results from what they reveal about human nature. They provide the starting point, but not necessarily the ending point, of any account of what it is to live a flourishing human life. In this regard, it is worthwhile to note that espousing the primacy of the nature of things over social constructs when grounding human knowledge in general, or ethical knowledge in particular, does not require one to begin by razing any and all social opinions or practices that might be subject to doubt or revision. Indeed, Cartesian methodology is but another version of the constructivism that metaphysical realism rejects.
- 41.
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, Question 94, Article 2, https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.I-II.Q94.A2.C.2.
- 42.
This is not to say that consequences have no role in the flourishing or self-perfecting life. Reflection on consequences is necessary in order to integrate the goods and virtues that constitute such a life for an individual into a unified whole, and so consequences have a derivative and bounded role to play in determining what actions an individual is to take. More exactly, the problem with consequentialism is its being seen as foundational in determining ethical obligations. See TPT, pp. 40–41.
- 43.
Even if some generic goods and virtues are foundational to other such goods and virtues, that in and of itself does not determine what the weighting of these goods and virtues ought to be, relative to other such goods and virtues, for an individual in a particular situation.
- 44.
TPT, p. 42. For how this view pertains to the common good and the political community , see the following works by Rasmussen and Den Uyl: NOL, pp. 197–205; “Norms of Liberty: Challenges and Prospects,” in Reading Rasmussen and Den Uyl: Critical Essays on Norms of Liberty; and “The Myth of Atomism,” pp. 843–70. Finally, see LN, pp. 131–71.
- 45.
See TPT, chapter 7, for our critiques of Stephen Darwall’s and Mark LeBar’s constructivist accounts of ethics.
- 46.
See TPT, pp. 45–51 and chapters 5 and 6 for our explanation and defense of natural teleology.
- 47.
This rational capacity “fundamentally involves the power to grasp the world in conceptual terms—that is to say, the power to form classifications, develop theories, formulate hypotheses, come to judgments, derive conclusions, reflect on various subjects (be they in the past, present, or future), make evaluations, develop purposes, and plan actions. This capacity is expressed in speculative reasoning (the pursuit of truth) and practical reasoning (the pursuit of human good ). It is manifested in our use of language, as well as in our development of culture and conventions—and, indeed, in those practices that constitute what could be called ‘forms of life.’ Rationality is the fundamental modality by which we consider and take on the issues of human life. Succinctly stated, rationality is the fundamental operating feature of the human life-form .” Ibid., p. 231. We will make use of this description of rational capacity again in later chapters.
- 48.
Aristotle, “And insight is of ultimate things in both directions; for insight and not reasoning is of the primary bounding principles and of ultimate things, and insight, in demonstrations, is of the immutable bounding principles, whereas insight, in matters of action, is of the ultimate and contingent and of the minor premise….” Nicomachean Ethics, 1143a35-b3. We owe this translation to Fred D. Miller, Jr.
- 49.
Direct insight or intuition is a type of cognition, but one still has to determine why the insight applies to this issue or is relevant to that problem. This is especially the case when one has competing insights.
- 50.
See NOL, pp. 81–83, 141–43; TPT, pp. 53–54; and LN, pp. 173–219.
- 51.
TPT, p. 52.
- 52.
“Virtue … is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e., the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1107a1–3, trans. W. D. Ross, in Richard McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1968).
- 53.
See Introduction in TPT.
- 54.
See NOL, chapters 6 and 7; TPT; and Douglas J. Den Uyl, The Virtue of Prudence (New York: Peter Lang, 1991).
- 55.
A complete accounting of the steps is in NOL, pp. 269–83.
- 56.
TPT, pp. 66–89.
- 57.
Nor is universalizability sufficient to determine moral obligations, as we make clear in ibid. For this reason, we do not pursue a discussion of perfect and imperfect duties.
- 58.
NOL, pp. 269–70, slightly modified.
- 59.
This is a shortened version of the criteria. For the full statement, see NOL, p. 272.
- 60.
See NOL, chapters 4, 11 and 12, for a full defense of this claim.
- 61.
Self-direction should not be confused with autonomy in either the Kantian or Millean sense. Self-direction is simply “the act of using one’s reason and judgment upon the world in an effort to understand one’s surroundings, to make plans to act, and to act within or upon those surroundings.” NOL, p. 89.
- 62.
All forms of encroachment on self-direction by others have their basis in physical compulsion. For a detailed account of this point and discussion of related matters, see NOL, pp. 89–90 n15, p. 90 n16, pp. 279–80, and pp. 303–11.
- 63.
As noted earlier, this requires both a sophisticated legal system and a consideration of the extensive role of contracts.
- 64.
Lon L. Fuller, “Human Interaction and the Law,” in Kenneth I. Winston, ed., The Principles of Social Order: Selected Essays of Lon L. Fuller, rev. ed. (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2001), p. 264.
- 65.
TPT, p. 70.
- 66.
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 5th ed., trans. F. H. Peters (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Truebner & Co. 1893), 1113a30–33. This ideal man exercises insight. See footnote 48 above.
- 67.
See discussion of generic goods and virtues above.
- 68.
See TPT, chapter 2.
- 69.
Billy Christmas, “Responsibility, Respect, and Justice: Skepticism about Metanorms,” Reason Papers 39, no. 2 (Winter 2017): pp. 48–59. What follows is taken with only minor changes from our response to Christmas. See Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen, “The Need for Metanormativity: A Response to Christmas,” Reason Papers 39, no. 2 (Winter 2017): 60–68.
- 70.
Christmas, “Responsibility, Respect, and Justice,” pp. 54–55.
- 71.
See NOL, pp. 160–63, for a discussion of the need for three senses of justice: Platonic justice, metanormative justice, and normative justice (which we cash out in terms of the virtue of justice). We will have more to say about these three senses of justice below.
- 72.
Hence, Christmas is mistaken to suggest that we do not “offer an ethical basis for our political obligations to each and every person, more or less regardless of other circumstances” (“Responsibility, Respect, and Justice,” p. 55). Yet, as we shall see, it is by no means necessary to suppose that all the ethical principles generated by individualistic perfectionism must function in the same way or manner. Not all norms that develop from such an ethics need have perfection as their aim. Indeed, what motivates such thinking is we have above called “equinormativity,” the supposition that all ethical norms are of the same type or have the same function. See NOL, pp. 33–41.
- 73.
See NOL, pp. 301–03.
- 74.
This is not an altogether new idea. See, e.g., Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc., 1976), II.ii.I., pp. 5–7.
- 75.
See footnote 61 above. To emphasize this point in a slightly different manner, there is a difference in protecting the possibility of choice and protecting exercising choice rightly. Metanorms are concerned with the former.
- 76.
A metanormative principle is an “ethical principle that is not used to provide guidance in the pursuit of self-perfection because it does not consider the particular situation, culture or nexus of persons …. [T]his ethical principle is transcultural, transpersonal, and universal.” NOL, pp. 272–73. See also footnote 81 below. Finally, we hold that ethical concepts or principles arise from confronting practical problems in human living and thus have different functions and ranges of applicability. For a discussion of the range of applicability of metanorms (individual rights), see LN, pp. 144–51. This issue is also discussed in the next chapter.
- 77.
See NOL, pp. 333–38. For a discussion of this issue from a Kantian perspective, see Arthur Ripstein, Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), chapter 6, pp. 145–81.
- 78.
See NOL, pp. 103–06, for a discussion of this issue with respect to property rights. So, as noted earlier in this chapter, we do not deny that there is a role for convention and custom; but in response to the sixth set of questions in Chap. 1, this does not mean that rights are fundamentally only constructions or that the conventions and customs that implement these rights are simply arbitrary. We will discuss this issue further in Chaps. 3 and 4.
- 79.
Christmas, “Responsibility, Respect, and Justice,” p. 56.
- 80.
See NOL, pp. 66–69 and 265–68, for a discussion and analysis of this sort of claim.
- 81.
See ibid., pp. 287–88. Indeed, it does not require any virtue; one could follow them out of fear of punishment, if one did not. Rights are not about producing virtue of any type. We also take up this point in Chap. 8 when discussing what is required for securing compliance with a legal order based on rights.
- 82.
See ibid., pp. 271–73, for a full discussion of liberalism’s problem and the criteria for solving that problem. See also TPT, pp. 89–94.
- 83.
See NOL, pp. 244–50, for discussion of this issue.
- 84.
The open-ended, natural sociality of an individual, combined with the agent-relative, individualized, and self-directed character of human good, gives rise to the need for individuals to find a solution to liberalism’s problem.
- 85.
Ayn Rand, “From My ‘Future File’,” The Ayn Rand Letter 3, no. 26 (September 23, 1974): 4–5 (first emphasis added). See also Den Uyl and Rasmussen, “The Myth of Atomism,” pp. 843–70; and LN, pp. 162–65.
- 86.
As noted above, “nexus” refers to the set of circumstances, talents, endowments, interests, beliefs, and histories that descriptively characterize an individual; see TPT, p. 54.
- 87.
Employing requires the use of practical wisdom and all that this involves, while following does not—at least, in the sense that the only standard that the latter conduct must meet is conforming to the metanormative rule. There can be questions regarding what in certain contexts following a metanorm involves, but these questions do not require a consideration of an individual’s nexus. Indeed, one of the reasons for metanorms is to treat people the same without giving preference to one form of individuality and perfection over another.
- 88.
That is, if all ethical norms were universal, impersonal, exceptionless, and not for attaining good or avoiding evil for individuals or specific groups. For an account of how our metanormative approach to rights is different from Kant’s, see NOL, pp. 51–62.
- 89.
On this point, see the Introduction and chapters 1 and 2 of TPT.
- 90.
See our discussion of whether individual rights really are about individuality, in the Afterword of ibid., pp. 329–31.
- 91.
It should be added, at least in passing, that this response still does not address the issue of enforceability. The problem for Christmas’s position remains: If all norms that result from an ethics of self-perfection are of the same type and have the same function—namely, promoting individual self-perfection—it is by no means clear how there can be a principled basis for determining which norms will be legally enforced and which will not, let alone how that principled basis could be individual rights. This may be a reason why the Aristotelian tradition is often mired in perfectionist politics and why in recent years there has been such a perceptible drift away from individual rights as a basis for libertarian theory! In this regard, it should not be forgotten that the central concern for NOL is how to provide a basis for non-perfectionist politics (individual rights) within the context of a perfectionist ethics.
- 92.
An individual’s self-perfection cannot be achieved independently and apart from others. Accordingly, a concern for one’s own self-perfection requires continued reflection upon the nature and conditions for social life in its most open-ended sense. Individualism is not atomism . See our discussion of this point in Sect. 1, “Rights as a Moral Concept,” above, and in NOL, pp. 141–43, 206–22, and 270–71.
- 93.
What follows is taken from NOL, pp. 160–63.
- 94.
Cf. LN, pp. 173–219.
- 95.
As noted above, the open-ended character of our natural sociality creates the need for finding principles that will allow for the possibility that individuals might flourish in different ways (in different communities and cultures), without requiring that one form of flourishing be structurally privileged over another.
- 96.
Aristotle seems not to clearly distinguish between the specific and open-ended senses of sociality. Nor, with his use of the term “polis,” did he distinguish clearly between society and state. So, it should be noted that this account of the virtue of justice differs from his.
- 97.
Den Uyl, The Virtue of Prudence, pp. 194–95.
- 98.
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, Question 23, Article 3, Answer of Objection 3, https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q23.A3.C.2, and Question 80, Article 1, https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q80.A1.C.
- 99.
See “Jeffrey Paul and Fred D. Miller, Jr., “Communitarian and Liberal Theories of the Good,” The Review of Metaphysics 43, no. 4 (June 1990), pp. 803–30; especially pages 821–25.
- 100.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 104.
- 101.
Elizabeth Anderson, who coined the term “luck egalitarianism,” notes that luck egalitarians are concerned with “correcting a supposed cosmic injustice.” “What is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109, no. 2 (1999): 288. Also, Thomas Nagel illustrates this view when he states: “How could it not be an evil that some people’s life prospects at birth are radically inferior to others?” Equality and Partiality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 28. We thank David McPherson for calling our attention to these statements.
- 102.
Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 83.
- 103.
Rawls, ibid., pp. 101–02.
- 104.
Rawls, ibid., p. 102.
- 105.
These problems are adapted from Douglas B. Rasmussen, “Liberalism and Natural End Ethics,” American Philosophical Quarterly 27, no. 2 (April 1990): 153–61. For an overall critique of Rawls, see Douglas B. Rasmussen, “A Critique of Rawls’ Theory of Justice,” The Personalist 55, no. 3 (Summer 1974): 303–18.
- 106.
David Miller, Principles of Social Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 148–49. We thank Billy Christmas for calling our attention to this passage.
- 107.
Rawls would seem not to want to endorse the confiscation of living body parts in the name of his theory of justice. However, Cécile Fabre argues in Whose Body is it Anyway?: Justice and the Integrity of the Person (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) that in the name of distributive justice, an individual lacks the unqualified right to withhold access to her living body parts from those who need them. Yet, see the Research Group on Constitutional Studies Debate, March 31, 2016, between Cécile Fabre (Oxford) and Eric Mack (Tulane) on “Individualism, Liberty, and Self-Ownership,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2YczpQPPtM. See also Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl, “Self-Ownership,” NOL, chapter 9, for our approach to the issue of self-ownership.
- 108.
Fred D. Miller, Jr., “The Natural Right to Private Property,” in Tibor R. Machan, ed., The Libertarian Reader (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), p. 278.
- 109.
TPT, pp. 107–17.
- 110.
Jeffrey Paul and Fred D. Miller, Jr., “Communitarian and Liberal Theories of the Good,” pp. 824–25.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rasmussen, D.B., Den Uyl, D.J. (2020). How to Understand and Justify Individual Rights: A Synopsis. In: The Realist Turn. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48435-4_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48435-4_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-48434-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-48435-4
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)