Discussion of Hammond’s Paper

Abstract

In his paper Peter Hammond suggests an ingenious formal model — the multivalued game form — as a tool for modelling rights. While the traditional method of modelling rights using social choice rules has been criticized and game forms have been suggested as a superior alternative, Hammond’s construct has the advantage of including both the traditional social choice models and game forms as special cases. I will argue below that this is not enough. Such a formal generalization may be neither necessary nor sufficient. To answer significant questions about rights and their role in social decision-making we need to go a step further. We need a model which is rich enough to allow simultaneously for the intuitive ethical considerations which underlie traditional social choice and game form models of rights.