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Rights Thinking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Evan Simpson
Affiliation:
McMaster University

Extract

Judgments about right are normally circumscribed and balanced by other considerations but it is possible to imagine ‘rights thinking’ as occurring without any such admixture. This pure rights thinking is characterized by several distinctive features. First, resentment, respect, and other passions of rectitude overrule sympathetic feelings of concern and compassion, love and affection. One responds simply as justice demands, never allowing extraneous factors to interfere with satisfaction of this moral ideal. Second, when claims of rights collide with personal attachments or calculations of benefit, the right systematically prevails. For example, rights thinking resists assertions presented to justify breaking promises to friends for their supposed greater good. Third, although rights entail obligations to their holders, responsibilities to others extend no further than these entailments within pure rights thinking. No general obligation of benevolence is recognized, for example, since no one in particular has a right to one's benevolence. Hence, fourth, as well as entailing moral protections for their holders and defining centres of independent agency, the perception of rights also promotes one's fundamental separateness from others.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1997

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References

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2 Gilligan, pp. 38, 57.

3 The sharpness of rights thinking is also expressed in a ‘logic of fairness’ (Gilligan, p. 32) according to which having a right appears to entail that it is to be honoured whatever the circumstances.Google Scholar The softer view that it does not follow logically from having a right that the object of the right must be accorded is expressed by Judith Jarvis, Thompson, The Realm of Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 120.Google Scholar

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