ȃȇǿ Partʺʺ: Politics and PhilosophyōŎşŠŞōŏŠ ŞőōşśŚŕŚœ ঠŒōŢśŞ śŒ ŞŕœŔŠş
Ļe most immaculately antiutilitarian version of the rights doctrine boils
down all too soon to simply promulgating rights and even to anathematiz-
ing disagreement as a sign of moral deficiency. Some antiutilitarian pro-
ponents of rights (RothbardȀȈȆȂ, RothbardȀȈȇȁ, GewirthȀȈȆȇ, Mack
ȀȈȆȇ, PaulȀȈȆȇ) do offer arguments, after all, but arguments of peculiarly
abstract kinds—appealing (as already noted) to self-ownership and Lock-
ean homesteading or, alternatively, to what one must say about rights to
avoid logical error.
Consider, for example, what Alan Gewirth does with his Principle of
Generic Consistency, which, “unlike utilitarian and material deontologi-
cal theories, ... contains within itself the ground of its necessity; it is self-
justifying” (ȀȈȆȇ, quotation from p.ȁǿȂ). Certain rights must be respected
if each person, a purposive being, is to strive effectively for his purposes.
He cannot consistently claim these rights for himself while denying them
to persons affected by his actions when the very reasons he gives for claim-
ing the rights for himself also apply to those other persons. He would be
uttering logically contradictory propositions. In effect he would be saying:
All persons for whom such-and-such reasons hold, including me, have
such-and such rights; yet he would deny, when expedient for himself, that
other persons have those rights even though the stated reasons do hold for
them also.
I question the supposed logicalcontradiction. An egoist might consider
it expedient to claim certain rights for himself and deny them to others
when he can get away with it.Heis not necessarily accepting certain state-
ments about rights as objectively true;heis not committing logical error.
Instead, he considers it expedient to encourage other persons to hold cer-
tain beliefs about rights, beliefs in which those others might perceive con-
tradictions if they were astute enough. If he can thereby further his own
purposes, why should he care about the contradictions in other persons’
beliefs? (In taking up what he calls “the Machiavellian case,” pp.ȀȈȅ–ȀȈȇ,
Gewirth does try, but ineffectually, to rebut a counterargument similar to
but not the same as mine.) We might consider the person a scoundrel, but
that is not the same as his being a poor logician.
Eric Mack (ȀȈȆȇ) tries to derive the existence of rights from the propo-
sition that coercion is deontically wrong—wrong because of its very char-
acter and not just because of its consequences. Because each person is an
end in himself, it is deontically wrong for others to cause his actions to