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Utility and the Value of Persons: A Response to Professor Brandt's Comments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Claudia Card
Claudia Card*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin - Madison
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Extract

I have four responses to make, the first three very brief and the last not much longer.

On the face of it, it looks as though in attributing rights to people one is saying something about their moral position. This is so for both option-rights and welfare-rights. On H.L.A. Hart's account of rights to freedom, that is exactly what one is doing. One is asserting that those who have the right have a special kind of justification for limiting the freedom of others. On Professor Brandt's view, it appears that attributing a right to someone is just an oblique way of saying something about the moral position of others, and nothing more.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , March 1984 , pp. 39 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1984

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References

1 Hart, H.L.A. ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’, Philosophical Review, 64 (1955) 175-91CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Feinberg, Joel ‘Duties, Rights, and Claims.’ American Philosophical Quarterly, 3 (1966) 143Google Scholar

3 Brandt, R.B. ‘Utilitarianism and Moral Rights.’ this issue, 4–5Google Scholar

4 Brandt, R.B. ‘Comments on Professor Card's Critique.’ this issue, 34Google Scholar

5 See Sober, Elliot Simplicity (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for the presentation, elaboration, and defense of this idea.

6 The Moral Law, trans. Paton, H.J. (London: Hutchinson 1948), 71Google Scholar

7 In Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, S. 435, Kant uses the term ‘Würde’ (‘dignity’), rather than the more general Würdigkeit’ ('worthiness’). An interesting paper on dignity is Aurel Kolnai's ‘Dignity,’ Philosophy, 51 (1976) 251-71, not included in the collection of his essays, Ethics, Value and Reality: Selected Papers of Aurel Kolnai (Indianapolis: Hackett 1978).

8 It can imply either that the thing is valued positively or that it is valued negatively, as evidenced by the ambiguity of ‘I really appreciate what you did for me,’ which one can say without lying to a well-intentioned but bumbling friend whose feelings one does not wish to hurt. Ordinarily, that sort of remark is not heard as ambiguous. To communicate that one did not care for something, one could say, more straightforwardly, ‘I did not appreciate that one bit,’ which implies that, in a way, one did.