Chapter ǴǺ: Rights, Contract, and Utility in Policy Espousal ȃȇȀbe out of accord with his own purposes, which is what coercion does. Ļe
deontic wrongness of coercion condemns any destruction of freedom by
it. Contractual rights and property rights can also be vindicated by recog-
nition of their violation as essentially coercive. Mack recognizes that util-
itarian reasons for respecting rights could be grafted onto his argument
but maintains that his argument does not depend on them.
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Ļe examples already given illustrate how antiutilitarian ethicists stop short,
before a utilitarian would, with mere propounding or with appeal to irre-
ducible intuition (even if they do not use the term). But what is intuition
based on? Perhaps on an unarticulated recognition of consequences—tacit
utilitarianism. Conceivably humans have an innate propensity, elaborated
by natural selection, to develop such intuitions. If so, the consequences of
having or not having them must have figured in the biological process.
Why not, then, strive to clarify those intuitions by disciplined observa-
tion and reasoning? It seems inadequate to rest everything on the assertion,
for example, that individuals, as ends in themselves, simply should not be
coerced. Such a line of argument does not take adequate account of the
social context in which questions about rights arise. Ļe utilitarian, how-
ever, does press on with an empirically oriented investigation into what
sorts of institutions and practices do and what sorts do not accord well
with human nature and the human condition.
Supposed axioms about rights cannot serve as the ultimate founda-
tion of one’s conception of desirable social arrangements. Instead, propo-
sitions about rights must be argued for, along with other propositions
about what makes for a good society. John Gray (ȀȈȇȂ, esp. pp.ȄȈ–ȅǿ,ȅȅ,
ȅȇ) maintains that John Stuart Mill in effect sought—successfully, Gray
implies—to provide a utilitarian underpinning for respect for rights.
Another ethicist-economist who does so is Henry Hazlitt (ȀȈȅȃ,
pp.ȁȇȅ–ȁȇȆ). Within necessary qualifications, he says,
legal rights are or ought to beinviolable.And so, of course, should moral
rights be.
Ļis inviolability does not rest on some mystical yet self-evident “law of
nature.” It rests ultimately (though it will shock many to hear this) on util-
itarian considerations. But it rests, not onad hocutilitism [sic], on expe-
diency in any narrow sense, but onruleutilitism, on the recognition that