Chapter 9: The Nature and Value of Rights
Chapter 9: The Nature and Value of Rights
Amazon Reference:
Quote:
“All duties entail other people’s rights and all rights entail other people’s duties.”
What I expect to learn:
I expect to learn about how human rights are necessary for determining whether an action is morally good or not and what would happen if nobody had any rights.
Review:
If you wanted to really get to know what was fundamental to morality, or anything else for that matter, wouldn’t it make sense to come up with a situation wherein you could totally control all the variables involved in the study and manipulate them so as to determine which were essential and which were only the effects. This would pose a problem since you would be studying people and their behavior, but instead of using real people and objects as subjects, everything would just be in your imagination, which was what exactly Joel Feinberg did.
He imagined a fictional world, which he named Nowheresville, where nobody had any rights at all. But in order for this fictional world to even start to exist, he envisioned it to have people that were very good in the moral sense. Thus, in a normal situation, there would be harmony and order, just like in any normal scenario in our real world. But what would happen in an abnormal situation where people got killed, abused, or had their property damaged? Since people didn’t have rights, they couldn’t accuse the negligent person who caused the abnormal situation to happen. They couldn’t claim that they were abused or had their property damaged because they didn’t have the rights to back them up. In any situation where any normal person’s rights would have been violated, the people of Nowheresville can’t do anything and thus they are deprived of their self-respect and human dignity would not exist.
Feinberg argues that rights are fundamentally important to morality. Due to the rights that we have, people now have the duty to treat others well and respect them as humans. Although this doesn’t necessarily prompt people to do good, it at least refrains them from doing bad things to others. Rights fuel not only our legal system but also our notion of morality as well.
What I learned:
- The role of rights in our notion of morality.
- The interrelatedness of morality, rights, and duties.
- The effect of a lack of rights would have to a society.
Integrative Questions:
- How are rights and duties related?
- Which comes first, a right or a duty? Explain.
- Why are rights fundamentally important to morality?
- What would happen if nobody had any rights?
- What is the end result at a personal level if there were no rights?
