Abstract
A primary purpose of the preceding three chapters has been to determine the extent to which people are obligated to act in the interests of others. To this end, I have argued that beneficence as such is neither perfectly nor imperfectly obligatory, and that the moral significance of beneficence consists in its relation to the concepts of supererogation and of praiseworthiness. I have suggested that, in contrast, anti-maleficence is obligatory, although my account of the morality of anti-maleficence is not yet complete.
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References
H.J. McCloskey, “Rights,” Philosophical Quarterly, 15 (1965), p. 120.
M.P. Golding, “Towards a Theory of Human Rights,” The Monist, 52 (1968), pp. 542–543.
McCloskey, “Rights--Some Conceptual Issues,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 54 (1976), p. 106.
Golding, “Towards a Theory of Human Rights,” p. 543.
Carl Wellman, Welfare Rights (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1982), p. 30.
Ibid., p. 114.
Ibid., pp. 22f.
Golding, “The Primacy of Welfare Rights,” Social Philosophy and Policy, 1 (1984), pp. 122f.
Ibid., p. 135.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 131.
Ibid., pp. 131–132.
Joel Feinberg, “The Nature and Value of Rights,” Journal of Value Inquiry, 4 (1970), p. 253.
McCloskey, “Rights,” p. 118.
I have examined this issue at greater length in “Is There a Right to Freedom?” Philosophical Studies, 49 (1986), pp. 71–81. For a different type of criticism of the notion of a right to freedom, see Ronald Dworkin, “We Do Not Have a Right to Liberty,” in Robert M. Stewart (ed.), Readings in Social and Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 297–305.
The view I have been discussing--or one very much like it--is espoused by Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1974). For an effective criticism of Nozick’s position, see Thomas Nagel, “Libertarianism Without Foundations,” The Yale Law Journal, 85 (1975), pp. 136–149.
For an examination of the philosophical status of needs, see David Braybrooke, Meeting Needs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).
According to Donald Davidson, refrainings manifest agency only if they are events. See Davidson’s essay “Agency” in his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 43–62. If Davidson’s view is correct, and if the argument I am about to present is sound, then (at least some) refrainings are events. In this connection, see also David Lewis’ discussion of “events of omission” in volume two of his Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 189–193.m
For a discussion of the relation between agency and causality, see Davidson, “Agency,” pp. 47–55.
For a particularly good discussion of the way in which refrainings manifest agency, see Alison McIntyre, Omissions and Other Acts, Doctoral Dissertation, Princeton University, 1985. My thinking about refrainings and agency was helped considerably by McIntyre’s remarks on the subject.
My imaginary objective view is of course patterned after the account defended by Richard Brandt in A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1979).
See in particular David Lyons, Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 198–216.
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Montague, P. (1992). Welfare Rights. In: In the Interests of Others. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 55. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2777-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2777-6_4
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