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There's a lot made of Rights - on barbelith as much as anywhere else. But for some reason its been making my head itch more than usual. I'm hoping this might as good a time and place as any to take a bit of a back-to-basics approach and get to grips with the fundamentals, without derailing other threads here concerned with the specifics.
Fortunately, SMatthewStolte's thread on Gun Ownership offers me a good off-board example of where things seem more obvious to others than they do to me. To quote for the Michael Huemer article cited there:
I begin with some general remarks about the moral framework I presuppose. I assume that individuals have at least some moral rights that are logically prior to the laws enacted by the state, and that these rights place restrictions on what sort of laws ought to be made. I assume that we may appeal to intuitions to identify some of these rights.
This strikes me as a very bold assumption. In fact two very bold assumptions; that individuals have rights prior to legal rights, and that these can be identified reliably by dint of intuition.
How do you stand on this? Are there universal moral rights? Are they self-evident?
I further assume that we normally have a right to do as we wish unless there is a reason why we should not be allowed to do so
Any problem with this? Is the lack of a prohibition against doing something the same as a right to do it? Is the use of 'normally' significant?
I distinguish between absolute and prima facie rights. An absolute right is one with overriding importance, such that no considerations can justify violating it. A prima facie right is one that must be given some weight in moral deliberation but that can be overridden by sufficiently important countervailing considerations. But then, It is doubtful whether any rights are absolute. At any rate, I do not propose any absolute rights
Does this work? Are there no absolute moral rights? Can we make sense of rights-talk without them? Are all rights modified by circumstances? If so, how do we decide how circumstances modify them? How do we weigh rights against one another? To what principles do we appeal? What's the status of these principles?
You get the idea. Rights: What are they, where do we get them from, what can we do with them? |
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