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Is There Moral Magic in the Word “Right”? Cruft on Rights and the Elusive “Deontically Infused Good”

A Discussion of Rowan Cruft, Human Rights, Ownership, and the Individual. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 304, $ 70.00

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Notes

  1. Joel Feinberg, “The Nature and Value of Rights,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, 4.4 (1970), 243–60.

  2. Michael Thompson, “What Is It to Wrong Someone? A Puzzle about Justice,” in Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, ed. by R. Jay Wallace and others (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 333–84; Stephen L. Darwall, “Bipolar Obligation,” in Oxford Studies in Metaethics. Volume 7, ed. by Russ Shafer-Landau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 333–58;Gopal Sreenivasan, “Duties and Their Direction,” Ethics, 120.3 (2010), 465–94; Simon Căbulea May, “Moral Status and the Direction of Duties,” Ethics, 123.1 (2012), 113–28.

  3. Feinberg has an answer to that, on which I will focus in §2.4.

  4. All references from now on as HROI.

  5. A caveat I will dispute later.

  6. Thomas Scanlon calls “assurance” the benefit promise-keeping brings to promisees (“Promises and Contracts,” in The Theory of Contract Law: New Essays, ed. by Peter Benson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 86–117, at pp. 93-99). The account of “assurance” I am offering here differs from Scanlon’s in relevant details. The differences deliberately aim at rendering my account applicable to rights satisfaction rather than promise-keeping.

  7. See H.L.A. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights?,” The Philosophical Review, 64.2 (1955), 175–91, p. 180 and Gopal Sreenivasan, “A Hybrid Theory of Claim-Rightst,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 25.2 (2005), 257–74, pp. 262-7 and “Public Goods, Individual Rights, and Third-Party Benefits,” in New Essays on the Nature of Rights, ed. by Mark McBride (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2017), pp. 127–48.

  8. David Owens, Shaping the Normative Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 143.

  9. Ibid., p. 146.

  10. Those are the scenarios that Cruft dubs STRONGEST and STRONG A respectively (HROI, 121) and that he believes characterize the justifiability of a natural right.

  11. Contra, among others, Seana Valentine Shiffrin, “Promising, Intimate Relationships, and Conventionalism,” The Philosophical Review, 117.4 (2008), 481–524.

  12. Feinberg, “The Nature and Value,” p. 257.

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  1. Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Mexico

    Giulio Fornaroli

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Correspondence to Giulio Fornaroli.

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For comments on earlier versions of this note, I am grateful to Joe Bowen, Saladin Meckled-Garcia, Cosmin Vraciu, Albert Weale, the participants to a 2020 UCL Political Theory Workshop and (especially) Rowan Cruft and Robert Mullins.

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Fornaroli, G. Is There Moral Magic in the Word “Right”? Cruft on Rights and the Elusive “Deontically Infused Good”. Law and Philos 40, 443–454 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-020-09402-6

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