3/14/2023 0 Comments Hedonic consequentialism![]() The same is true of the ex boyfriend case. ![]() ![]() Making sound is a rights violation iff it causes enough harm to be worth calling one. The point stands far more as a result of the examples. Even if we limit ourselves to talking, if the talking in question is an ex-boyfriend who won’t stop following around his ex-girlfriend telling her about how much he loves her and how he won’t be able to live without her, how he might commit suicide if she doesn’t come back, etc., that’s very much something we all actually do think on reflection the ex-girlfriend has a right against. It should be noted that everyone, on reflection, actually does believe that we have at least some rights against people producing soundwaves that will enter our ears without our consent -hence noise laws. Other accounts of rights, I argue, are wildly implausible, lacking firm ontological foundation.Ī straightforward moral rights intuition is that we have a right not to be shot that’s much more serious than our right not to have certain soundwaves impact our ears. Thus, this explains what rights are, and which things are rights. Consequentialism says that X should be enshrined as a right iff 1 doing so has good consequences. My claim wasn’t merely that consequentialism captures what we want about rights, it was that consequentialism is the only way to explain what rights we have in the first place. On a more pressing note, Ben’s response misses the point. (Consequences are given their due, but we’re still treating individuals as the unit of moral evaluation in a way we’re just not when we throw all harms and all benefits onto the scales as if they were all being experienced by one great big hive mind.) Matthew, meanwhile, claims that the appearance of (non-reducible) moral rights can be better explained by the moral importance of good and bad consequences.Īs I’ve previously shown, consistent Rawlsians would be utilitarians - disproportionately caring about the badly off makes no sense. So for instance I claim that much of what’s plausible about utilitarianism can be (better) explained by Rawls’s theory of justice. How successful any given attempt is, of course, has to be evaluated case-by-case. It’s generally true about moral theories that partisans of one moral theory will try to show how their theory can capture what’s plausible about another. For example, we don’t think it’s a violation of rights to look at people, but if every time we were looked at we experienced horrific suffering, we would think it was a rights violation to look at people. Additionally, if things that we currently don’t think of as rights began to maximize hedonic value to be enshrined as rights, we would think that they should be recognized as rights. The only difference between shooting bullets at people, and shooting soundwaves (ie making noise) is one causes a lot of harm, and the other one does not. We think people have the right not to let other people enter their house, but we don’t think they have the right not to let other people look at their house. For example, we think people have the right to life, which obviously makes people’s lives better. 1 Everything that we think of as a right is reducible to utility considerations.
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