carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes) (10/15/86)
[janw] >I addressed your argument, and >refuted it (it was based on a transparent sophism about a "right to >conditions of good life" - a right to end all rights). The point is that there is at least as much justification for a right to the conditions of a good life as there is for the right to unlimited procreation. Jan denies that there are welfare rights, but affirms an absolute right to unlimited procreation, which he apparently derives as a corollary from an absolute right to dispose of one's body. Fine. The question then is, why affirm one putative right and deny the other, dogmatism apart. What is the source of the "true" rights, on what basis are they ascribed? Jan's position seems to imply that one has an absolute right to dispose of one's body, including unlimited procreation, regardless of any harmful consequences this may have for other persons. I doubt that I am the only one who finds this assertion (as it has so far remained) hard to swallow. So I ask Jan to provide a theoretical basis for this alleged right rather than simply asserting it. As far as I know, Nozick does not address this question in *AS&U*. He begins, "Individuals have rights..." but nowhere gives a basis in theory for the ascription of rights. J.S. Mill's answer in *Utilitarianism* ch. V is interesting: To have a right, then, is, I conceive, to have something which society ought to defend me in the possession of. If the objector goes on to ask why it ought, I can give him no other reason than general utility. If that expression does not seem to convey a sufficient feeling of the strength of the obligation, nor to account for the peculiar energy of the feeling, it is because there goes to the composition of the sentiment, not a rational only but also an animal element -- the thirst for retaliation; and this thirst derives its intensity, as well as its moral justification, from the extraordinarily important and impressive kind of utility which is concerned. The interest involved is that of security, to everyone's feelings the most vital of all interests. All other earthly benefits are needed by one person, not needed by another; and many of them can, if necessary, be cheerfully foregone or replaced by something else; but security no human being can possibly do without; on it we depend for all our immunity from evil and for the whole value of all and every good, beyond the passing moment, since nothing but the gratification of the instant could be of any worth to us if we could be deprived of everything the next instant by whoever was momentarily stronger than ourselves. Now this most indispensable of all necessaries, after physical nutriment, cannot be had unless the machinery for providing it is kept unintermittedly in active play.... [etc.] Richard Carnes