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Comments on Professor Card's Critique

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

R.B. Brandt*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan

Extract

Professor Card is not disposed to object to the main argument of my paper, which was intended to reply to Professor Lyons’ suggestion that a utilitarian cannot explain how legal rights have moral force, and at the same time to urge that the particular form of utilitarianism espoused by Professor Hare in his recent work does seem to be open to the difficulty Professor Lyons alleges. Professor Card says she is ‘not dissatisfied’ with this reasoning. I suspect that Card views my criticism of Professors Lyons and Hare as part of an in-house squabble among philosophers all of whom have utilitarian leanings of one sort or another; and she is not disposed to intervene in this. She does, however, have serious reservations about utilitarian views of rights in general, and about mine in particular; her paper consists almost entirely of her statement of these reservations. I find her remarks very welcome, since they express some objections which may be widely felt, and a response to which may therefore contribute to philosophers’ thinking about these issues.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1984

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References

1 I should make clear that I am not a committed utilitarian myself. I have urged that what is morally right is what would be permitted by that moral code for the society of an agent, which would be supported by rational persons who expected to live in that society. I rather incline to think that this moral code would be a utility-maximizing one, but I remain open to argument.

2 Card suggests I should add to my definition of ‘x has a right to do Y’ that it is not morally wrong for X to do Y. The reason for the omission is that I think one sometimes has a moral right to do something which it is wrong to do. E.g., I have a moral right to speak publicly on political matters, but I may misuse it.

3 ‘The Concept of a Moral Right and its Function,’ Journal of Philosophy, 80 (1983) 29-45

4 ‘The Concepts of Obligation and Duty,’ Mind, 73 (1964) 374-95

5 In footnote no. 3

6 This paragraph is indebted to an unpublished paper by W.K. Frankena, ‘The Ethics of Respect for Persons.’