PERSONS, RIGHTS AND THE MORAL COMMUNITY
Preface
Rights can be invoked, they become more valuable when we understand them.
First-order rights discourse, the claiming of rights for themselves and others.
Second order rights discourse involves development of the grounding theory on which first-order rights claims are ultimately based.
How are we to adjudicate between contending rights?
Rights are so easy to claim, but so terribly difficult to justify.
First step toward making sense of rights is to understand how they can be possible.
Maximization is the keystone of utilitarian ethics and its modern counterpart, cost-benefit analysis. “the more is better than less” dictum.
By pretending that there are rights that must constrain conduct, we end up with better conduct than if each person were free to maximize the good according to his own lights”
Can it be rational deliberately to eschew maximization of an overall good?- Thomas nagel.
I have been enriched by discussion with more people than I can here listi individually.
A teacher learns more from his students than they do from him.
First-order rights discourse, the claiming of rights for themselves and others.
Second order rights discourse involves development of the grounding theory on which first-order rights claims are ultimately based.
How are we to adjudicate between contending rights?
Rights are so easy to claim, but so terribly difficult to justify.
First step toward making sense of rights is to understand how they can be possible.
Maximization is the keystone of utilitarian ethics and its modern counterpart, cost-benefit analysis. “the more is better than less” dictum.
By pretending that there are rights that must constrain conduct, we end up with better conduct than if each person were free to maximize the good according to his own lights”
Can it be rational deliberately to eschew maximization of an overall good?- Thomas nagel.
I have been enriched by discussion with more people than I can here listi individually.
A teacher learns more from his students than they do from him.
Chapter I The Use and Abuse of Basic Rights
The Use and Abuse of Basic Rights
If a clear basis for talk about moral rights can be set out, then it might serve as an accessory to subsequence acts of moral viewing with a synoptic eye.
Kinship status
Only a self-description as the right to life force is felt to be an adequately forceful characterization of the moral grounds undergirding the position.
-it is the right of privacy, of control over one’s own body (uncoercered choice)
subsequent stages of life are also graced with their appropriate rights claims.
It is difficult to discover any domain of human life concerning which claims of basic rights have not been earnestly and enthusiastically championed.
Even if neither of us is willing to give way entirely, the discussion process can suggest a workable compromise that safeguards what is most central to each.
Disputes of alleged right against right differ importantly from disputes of preference against preference.
One who is convinced that nothing short of a right is in jeopardy will no be equally motivated to pursue a strategy of compromise.
One who is entitled as a matter of right to some outcome is under no obligation to move away from that result in his dealings with others.
They must accede to his claim rather than open up a bargaining exchange in which each gives up something in order to scure something.
So long as I conceive of myself as a genuine rights holder, I can regard myself as entirely free to act in accord with my best lights.
There is a difference between debates carried out simply in terms of opposed and conflicting preferences and those in which rights are asserted.
Nozick: rights provide side constraints setting boounds within which policy may be formulated.
Unfortunate consequence is that what begins as a dispute between two private parties turns into a grievance against the policty.
The frustatrion of one’s preferences doeds not give rise to the same grounds for outraged complaint as does the disregarding one’s rights.
Are Rights Necessary?
The problem is to propose a strategy for resisting that temptation, a no first-strike mechanism
Solution: to eschew talk of moral rights altogether, to search elsewhere in the moral idiom for means to seek one’s due.
Moral rights have come from having derived them by means of antecedently held moral principles. Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness,
Natural rights- locke
Gerwirth purports to demonstrate the rational necessity of recognizing in oneself and all other agents rights to freedom and well-being.
Dworkin-the right of each person to be treated as an equal is a fundamental presupposition of any adequate social morality
Rawls: justice is the primary first principle that each person assigns an euqal right to the most extensive liberty compatible with a similar liberty for all other.- veil of ignorance.
It is time to play down moral rights in favor of less flashy but more solid reasoning about moral rightness.
The Need for Rights
Normative analysis is better served by careful attention to the structure of ethically relevant considerations than by rights appeals that rest on air.
What is it within the tradition that seems to respond so aptly to our most deeply prized convictions concerning the justified claims of individuals against their governments and against each other?
Affirmations of basic rights spring from a commitment to the value of the individual and in turn reflect that commitment into the moral arena.
Each person possesses a kind of sovereignty over his own life and that such sovereignty entails that he be accorded a zone of protected activity within which he is to be free from encroachment by others.
Individualism is the great value attaches to the ability of persons to lead their own lives, and that within a wide and durable sphere of freedom form interference by others they ought to be able to develop and pursue their own ideals of the good.
Basic rights rest on an individualistic foundation, language of rights, moral lexicon, that accents the special value of individualism.
Stand up like men, look others in the eye, and to feel in some fundamental way the equal of anyone.
Basic rights establish boundaries that others must respect, their recognition places severe constraints on the furtherance of social goals.
Normative debate that deemphasizes the importance of rights does not necessarily lead to such enormities, but by enlarging the boundaries of moral permissibility it tends to deemphasize individualism in favor of designs for large scale social reconstruction.
Normative stance?
Ethic that is pluralistic in the sense of not recognizing one set of overriding conditions within which moral life must take its bearings.
If a clear basis for talk about moral rights can be set out, then it might serve as an accessory to subsequence acts of moral viewing with a synoptic eye.
Kinship status
Only a self-description as the right to life force is felt to be an adequately forceful characterization of the moral grounds undergirding the position.
-it is the right of privacy, of control over one’s own body (uncoercered choice)
subsequent stages of life are also graced with their appropriate rights claims.
It is difficult to discover any domain of human life concerning which claims of basic rights have not been earnestly and enthusiastically championed.
Even if neither of us is willing to give way entirely, the discussion process can suggest a workable compromise that safeguards what is most central to each.
Disputes of alleged right against right differ importantly from disputes of preference against preference.
One who is convinced that nothing short of a right is in jeopardy will no be equally motivated to pursue a strategy of compromise.
One who is entitled as a matter of right to some outcome is under no obligation to move away from that result in his dealings with others.
They must accede to his claim rather than open up a bargaining exchange in which each gives up something in order to scure something.
So long as I conceive of myself as a genuine rights holder, I can regard myself as entirely free to act in accord with my best lights.
There is a difference between debates carried out simply in terms of opposed and conflicting preferences and those in which rights are asserted.
Nozick: rights provide side constraints setting boounds within which policy may be formulated.
Unfortunate consequence is that what begins as a dispute between two private parties turns into a grievance against the policty.
The frustatrion of one’s preferences doeds not give rise to the same grounds for outraged complaint as does the disregarding one’s rights.
Are Rights Necessary?
The problem is to propose a strategy for resisting that temptation, a no first-strike mechanism
Solution: to eschew talk of moral rights altogether, to search elsewhere in the moral idiom for means to seek one’s due.
Moral rights have come from having derived them by means of antecedently held moral principles. Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness,
Natural rights- locke
Gerwirth purports to demonstrate the rational necessity of recognizing in oneself and all other agents rights to freedom and well-being.
Dworkin-the right of each person to be treated as an equal is a fundamental presupposition of any adequate social morality
Rawls: justice is the primary first principle that each person assigns an euqal right to the most extensive liberty compatible with a similar liberty for all other.- veil of ignorance.
It is time to play down moral rights in favor of less flashy but more solid reasoning about moral rightness.
The Need for Rights
Normative analysis is better served by careful attention to the structure of ethically relevant considerations than by rights appeals that rest on air.
What is it within the tradition that seems to respond so aptly to our most deeply prized convictions concerning the justified claims of individuals against their governments and against each other?
Affirmations of basic rights spring from a commitment to the value of the individual and in turn reflect that commitment into the moral arena.
Each person possesses a kind of sovereignty over his own life and that such sovereignty entails that he be accorded a zone of protected activity within which he is to be free from encroachment by others.
Individualism is the great value attaches to the ability of persons to lead their own lives, and that within a wide and durable sphere of freedom form interference by others they ought to be able to develop and pursue their own ideals of the good.
Basic rights rest on an individualistic foundation, language of rights, moral lexicon, that accents the special value of individualism.
Stand up like men, look others in the eye, and to feel in some fundamental way the equal of anyone.
Basic rights establish boundaries that others must respect, their recognition places severe constraints on the furtherance of social goals.
Normative debate that deemphasizes the importance of rights does not necessarily lead to such enormities, but by enlarging the boundaries of moral permissibility it tends to deemphasize individualism in favor of designs for large scale social reconstruction.
Normative stance?
Ethic that is pluralistic in the sense of not recognizing one set of overriding conditions within which moral life must take its bearings.
Chapter II Persons and Projects
Concern for basic rights is concern for the individualism they express.
Self-direction as an essential component of human good is one postulate of an ethic with an individualistic core.
A doctrine of basic rights, should not present individualism as the only value worth upholding. It is, committed to regarding individualism as of paramount importance such that other ends taken to be of value to particular individuals or to society may not be pursued in ways that violate rights.
Prudential and Moral Reasons
Concern for basic rights is concern for the individualism they express.
A persons life is deficient unless it is directed by his own will.
A community that recognizes and respects basic rights is thereby signifying its willingness to sacrifice benefits that could otherwise be procured?
Individualism would be one moral commodity to be dispensed along with others so as to yield the greatest attainable product.
One empowered to make social choices will strive for a balance that optimizes the sum of expected utility.
Primary social goods will allow for more discriminating welfare comparisons.
Act so as to maximize the value of that function. P17
The problem that has been identified is that rights may prove to be inconvenient. They set up barriers which neither private individuals nor governmental bodies may breach at their pleasure. Human beings are notoriously susceptible to temptations to pursue their narrow self intetest at the expense of the well-being of others.
-rely on the individual’s heart to secure a decently livable life for all. So incusrsions must be prevented if we are to attain a tolerably decent measure of sociality.
Rule utilitarianism in all its versions is reconciled to forfeiting some opportunities for incremented utility gains: those which would entail the violation of an optimically utlity-enhacing rule.
Rights ascriptions, it may be said, are a generally reliable rule of thumb- but to rule out of court otherwise salutary actions merely because they involve rights violations is to transform a useful instrument into a fetish.
Prudential and Moral Reasons
Prevalence is due to the belief that moral rationality is very much like the rationality of prudence.
One acts in order to attain some end that one values.
the action may be chosen for its own sake, for the pleasure of doing that very thing, and it may be done for the sake of valued consequences that will flow from it.
Bodily movements like a twitch or knee jerk reflex can occur without there being any purpose to them, but action is inherently purposive.
When one person pursues one good, it is at the expense of others that could have been secured in its place. One end has been sacrificed for another.
Ones one time was opportunity cost. Only if a resource has no other uses valued by the agent is it free of cost.
1. action is purposive.
2. Ends differ in assigned value
3. Actions are costly in the opportunity sense that choice is a matter for rational appraisal.
Luck is involved but also skill. The skill involved in juggling possibilities for action in the light of their opportunity costs and probabilities of future goods and ills is the virtue of prudence.
Prudence: aristotles. Mean situated between the all-encompassing concern for present rewards and the miser’s perpetual postponement of enjoyment into a future that is always advancing before him. Is the maximization of expected value over the course of a lifetime.
Prudence is the maximixation of one person’s good.
Numerous alternative imputations of value could be discovered or invented, but in each case the person who subscribes to it will be acting rationally from the prudential standpoint if he evaluates all possible outcomes in terms of that standard and acts so as to achieve the greatest possible amount of good as measured by the standard.
The largest part of morality is concerned with interpersonal transactions.
Prudence: concern itself with the good for one person
Morality: involves the good of many persons.
P22. Taking into account all groups (econ in one lesson-good econ)
Occam’s razor: comes into play too, it is prima facie desirable that moral rationality have the same general form as rationality in the purely self-regarding realm. By thinking of morality as a kind of extended prudence, practical reasoning as a whole can share a common maximization core.
What is the moral analogue to the prudent man’s temporal indifference?
Impartiality involves weighting all ends by the same standard of value and striving to maximize the sum of this value irrespective of whose particular interest turn out to be favoured.
It must be one applicable to various persons’ ends and must issue in a determination which is not value for some particular person but value simpliciter. A standard that ranges over persons and their ends in this way is what I shall call an impersonal standard of value.P .23
Morality is impartial among persons. It is understood as constitutive of morality.
An agent aspiring to act morally must evaluate his own end by reference to the same impersonal standard of value he utilizes for the evaluation of any other individual’s ends. If its his that loses out, then so be it.
Projects
Look at differences among the kinds of ends that motivate persons’ actions. They differ in respect of the intensity of the desire for their realization. Intensity of desire is, one but by no means the only indicator of an end’s gravity.
Some ends are not once-and for all acknowledges and the realized through the successful completion of one particular action. Rather, they persist throughout large stretches of an individual’s life and continue to eleictir actions that establish a pattern coherent in virtue of the ends subserved.
1. persistence
2. centrality
3. structure.
One wishes to be a man of one’s word.
Projects explain more than an action; they help to explain a life.
They are of desire satisfaction.
One who undertakes projects has thereby ceased to be a tabula rasa. His violations have become channeled, not in every respect and not in a rigid and unvarying way,but channeled nonetheless by the ends he has undertaken to serve. The fact that some action would conflict with pursuit of one’s project is, by itself, reason to reject motivation from that direction. One who has identified himself with ends that constitute his own enduring reasons for leading a life of a certain sort is someone who has voluntarily assumed much of the burden of selecting what will or will not exert motivational force on him. For such a person, more than others, if indeed there be others, the model of a person as the passive locus at which passions collide is ill-suited. Project pursuers are passionate beings, but they have, in large measure, actively determined what will move them.
Projects and Partiality
Morality is seen as a kind of skill-and the willingness to use that skill: it is the art of effecting trade-offs sanctioned by an impersonal standard.
Those ends which issue in projects are, by definition, held to with distinctive tenacity. Though they need not be embraced come what may, they serve as a kind of shelter from the lure to abandon oneself to some whim or passing fancy.
The pursuer of project is tenacious, his opposite number tentative.
A person’s commitment to any persistent end must be less than whole-hearted.
He will be prepared to divert his attention from it to whatever new opportunity presents itself as a means for increasing impersonal value.
Edge away from the foil.
Foil- standard scale of values for everyone.
The most efficient means of maximizing value is generally to allow people to develop and pursue their own personal attachments, select only to constraints of minimally decent behavior toward others.
Rampant egoism and morality. P30
Claim that an impersonal standard of value is by itself sufficient trading off ends toward which one has undertaken commitments. P.31
It is the case that an adequate account of moral reasoning is one that incorporates both impersonal and personal elements, the former applicable in the same way to everyone, the latter being as various as the projects to which persons commit themselves.
They are deficicent in not being able to express correctly the relation that obtains between an agent and his own projects. P31 who is he talking about what agents?
Project and the coherence of persons
What is that constitutes the identity of a person over time?
Read locke’s essay about concerning human understandng!
One factor that bears on the identity of an individual: it is the persistent attatchemnt to ends that shape and continue to shape a person’s life.
Cohesive force?
Various short stretches of his life (indiscriminate evaluator), taken individually, would exhibit purposive activity, but the life as a whole would exhibit no coherence of practical activity. Such person is difficult to image without venturing into the realm of extreme psychosis.
I claim then that one component of a person’s identity over time is constituted by his commitment to projects.
Como planning tus ends puede perjudicar lo que estas viviendo en el presente? Existe una manera que te bloqueas de la otra informacion solo porque estas encontrando informacion para responder tu fin?
One’s identity is an identity which one creates by the act of identifying oneself with some ends above others. It is not innate but acquired.
Second: it is much closer to what he calls psychological continuity and connectedness, relations which obtain between temporal stages of a person’s life and of which there can be more or less.
1. someone who embraces projects to which he then holds in an undeviating manner, never forswearing or acting inconsistently,
2. the indiscriminate evaluator whose purposive behavior is completely chaotic.
“you are not the same person I once knew”, expresses the conviction that a very basic component of a person’s nature consists in the ends he adopts to become the being that he is.
The only state of affairs assigned positive value is the one who originally came up with the project and has reason to bring about.
Although the existence of some end may be due solely to causal antecedent localized within one person, once it has been created it provides reason for action to all.
The road to rights
To this point, the argument has been mostly negative in character, it was directed at showing that the initial plausibility of regarding morality as an unconstrained exercise in the maximization of some social value function should be questioned. It should be questioned because the maximization requirement rests on a presupposition that there does exist or can exist some impersonal standard of value to which all persons have reason to adhere throughout their self-regarding conduct and in their dealings with others.
This no longer remains credible once the centrality of projects in giving coherence to fully human lives is acknowledged.
It is the denial that morality enrolls us all as partners in the human enterprise to which all our efforts must be devoted. There is no such thing, there are only the various personal enterprises in which individuals enroll themselves and which provide them with irreducibly personal ends that they strive to realize.
A genuine moral community is possible only because projects typically almost inescapably involve essential reference to the well being of others.
Rights holders are free within the boundaries established by their basic rights to direct their own lives according to their own lights. Individualism is deserving of protection even though individualism can be inconvenient. Respect for basic rights affords that protection.
This chapter serves for support the recognition of basic rights.
What reason can an individual have to regard another’s interests as deserving of respect, as constraint on his own conduct that he rationally should acknowledge?
Lomasky- Individuals
Rational
Protected
Self-determination
Valores en si mismo- el individuo.
Self-direction as an essential component of human good is one postulate of an ethic with an individualistic core.
A doctrine of basic rights, should not present individualism as the only value worth upholding. It is, committed to regarding individualism as of paramount importance such that other ends taken to be of value to particular individuals or to society may not be pursued in ways that violate rights.
Prudential and Moral Reasons
Concern for basic rights is concern for the individualism they express.
A persons life is deficient unless it is directed by his own will.
A community that recognizes and respects basic rights is thereby signifying its willingness to sacrifice benefits that could otherwise be procured?
Individualism would be one moral commodity to be dispensed along with others so as to yield the greatest attainable product.
One empowered to make social choices will strive for a balance that optimizes the sum of expected utility.
Primary social goods will allow for more discriminating welfare comparisons.
Act so as to maximize the value of that function. P17
The problem that has been identified is that rights may prove to be inconvenient. They set up barriers which neither private individuals nor governmental bodies may breach at their pleasure. Human beings are notoriously susceptible to temptations to pursue their narrow self intetest at the expense of the well-being of others.
-rely on the individual’s heart to secure a decently livable life for all. So incusrsions must be prevented if we are to attain a tolerably decent measure of sociality.
Rule utilitarianism in all its versions is reconciled to forfeiting some opportunities for incremented utility gains: those which would entail the violation of an optimically utlity-enhacing rule.
Rights ascriptions, it may be said, are a generally reliable rule of thumb- but to rule out of court otherwise salutary actions merely because they involve rights violations is to transform a useful instrument into a fetish.
Prudential and Moral Reasons
Prevalence is due to the belief that moral rationality is very much like the rationality of prudence.
One acts in order to attain some end that one values.
the action may be chosen for its own sake, for the pleasure of doing that very thing, and it may be done for the sake of valued consequences that will flow from it.
Bodily movements like a twitch or knee jerk reflex can occur without there being any purpose to them, but action is inherently purposive.
When one person pursues one good, it is at the expense of others that could have been secured in its place. One end has been sacrificed for another.
Ones one time was opportunity cost. Only if a resource has no other uses valued by the agent is it free of cost.
1. action is purposive.
2. Ends differ in assigned value
3. Actions are costly in the opportunity sense that choice is a matter for rational appraisal.
Luck is involved but also skill. The skill involved in juggling possibilities for action in the light of their opportunity costs and probabilities of future goods and ills is the virtue of prudence.
Prudence: aristotles. Mean situated between the all-encompassing concern for present rewards and the miser’s perpetual postponement of enjoyment into a future that is always advancing before him. Is the maximization of expected value over the course of a lifetime.
Prudence is the maximixation of one person’s good.
Numerous alternative imputations of value could be discovered or invented, but in each case the person who subscribes to it will be acting rationally from the prudential standpoint if he evaluates all possible outcomes in terms of that standard and acts so as to achieve the greatest possible amount of good as measured by the standard.
The largest part of morality is concerned with interpersonal transactions.
Prudence: concern itself with the good for one person
Morality: involves the good of many persons.
P22. Taking into account all groups (econ in one lesson-good econ)
Occam’s razor: comes into play too, it is prima facie desirable that moral rationality have the same general form as rationality in the purely self-regarding realm. By thinking of morality as a kind of extended prudence, practical reasoning as a whole can share a common maximization core.
What is the moral analogue to the prudent man’s temporal indifference?
Impartiality involves weighting all ends by the same standard of value and striving to maximize the sum of this value irrespective of whose particular interest turn out to be favoured.
It must be one applicable to various persons’ ends and must issue in a determination which is not value for some particular person but value simpliciter. A standard that ranges over persons and their ends in this way is what I shall call an impersonal standard of value.P .23
Morality is impartial among persons. It is understood as constitutive of morality.
An agent aspiring to act morally must evaluate his own end by reference to the same impersonal standard of value he utilizes for the evaluation of any other individual’s ends. If its his that loses out, then so be it.
Projects
Look at differences among the kinds of ends that motivate persons’ actions. They differ in respect of the intensity of the desire for their realization. Intensity of desire is, one but by no means the only indicator of an end’s gravity.
Some ends are not once-and for all acknowledges and the realized through the successful completion of one particular action. Rather, they persist throughout large stretches of an individual’s life and continue to eleictir actions that establish a pattern coherent in virtue of the ends subserved.
1. persistence
2. centrality
3. structure.
One wishes to be a man of one’s word.
Projects explain more than an action; they help to explain a life.
They are of desire satisfaction.
One who undertakes projects has thereby ceased to be a tabula rasa. His violations have become channeled, not in every respect and not in a rigid and unvarying way,but channeled nonetheless by the ends he has undertaken to serve. The fact that some action would conflict with pursuit of one’s project is, by itself, reason to reject motivation from that direction. One who has identified himself with ends that constitute his own enduring reasons for leading a life of a certain sort is someone who has voluntarily assumed much of the burden of selecting what will or will not exert motivational force on him. For such a person, more than others, if indeed there be others, the model of a person as the passive locus at which passions collide is ill-suited. Project pursuers are passionate beings, but they have, in large measure, actively determined what will move them.
Projects and Partiality
Morality is seen as a kind of skill-and the willingness to use that skill: it is the art of effecting trade-offs sanctioned by an impersonal standard.
Those ends which issue in projects are, by definition, held to with distinctive tenacity. Though they need not be embraced come what may, they serve as a kind of shelter from the lure to abandon oneself to some whim or passing fancy.
The pursuer of project is tenacious, his opposite number tentative.
A person’s commitment to any persistent end must be less than whole-hearted.
He will be prepared to divert his attention from it to whatever new opportunity presents itself as a means for increasing impersonal value.
Edge away from the foil.
Foil- standard scale of values for everyone.
The most efficient means of maximizing value is generally to allow people to develop and pursue their own personal attachments, select only to constraints of minimally decent behavior toward others.
Rampant egoism and morality. P30
Claim that an impersonal standard of value is by itself sufficient trading off ends toward which one has undertaken commitments. P.31
It is the case that an adequate account of moral reasoning is one that incorporates both impersonal and personal elements, the former applicable in the same way to everyone, the latter being as various as the projects to which persons commit themselves.
They are deficicent in not being able to express correctly the relation that obtains between an agent and his own projects. P31 who is he talking about what agents?
Project and the coherence of persons
What is that constitutes the identity of a person over time?
Read locke’s essay about concerning human understandng!
One factor that bears on the identity of an individual: it is the persistent attatchemnt to ends that shape and continue to shape a person’s life.
Cohesive force?
Various short stretches of his life (indiscriminate evaluator), taken individually, would exhibit purposive activity, but the life as a whole would exhibit no coherence of practical activity. Such person is difficult to image without venturing into the realm of extreme psychosis.
I claim then that one component of a person’s identity over time is constituted by his commitment to projects.
Como planning tus ends puede perjudicar lo que estas viviendo en el presente? Existe una manera que te bloqueas de la otra informacion solo porque estas encontrando informacion para responder tu fin?
One’s identity is an identity which one creates by the act of identifying oneself with some ends above others. It is not innate but acquired.
Second: it is much closer to what he calls psychological continuity and connectedness, relations which obtain between temporal stages of a person’s life and of which there can be more or less.
1. someone who embraces projects to which he then holds in an undeviating manner, never forswearing or acting inconsistently,
2. the indiscriminate evaluator whose purposive behavior is completely chaotic.
“you are not the same person I once knew”, expresses the conviction that a very basic component of a person’s nature consists in the ends he adopts to become the being that he is.
The only state of affairs assigned positive value is the one who originally came up with the project and has reason to bring about.
Although the existence of some end may be due solely to causal antecedent localized within one person, once it has been created it provides reason for action to all.
The road to rights
To this point, the argument has been mostly negative in character, it was directed at showing that the initial plausibility of regarding morality as an unconstrained exercise in the maximization of some social value function should be questioned. It should be questioned because the maximization requirement rests on a presupposition that there does exist or can exist some impersonal standard of value to which all persons have reason to adhere throughout their self-regarding conduct and in their dealings with others.
This no longer remains credible once the centrality of projects in giving coherence to fully human lives is acknowledged.
It is the denial that morality enrolls us all as partners in the human enterprise to which all our efforts must be devoted. There is no such thing, there are only the various personal enterprises in which individuals enroll themselves and which provide them with irreducibly personal ends that they strive to realize.
A genuine moral community is possible only because projects typically almost inescapably involve essential reference to the well being of others.
Rights holders are free within the boundaries established by their basic rights to direct their own lives according to their own lights. Individualism is deserving of protection even though individualism can be inconvenient. Respect for basic rights affords that protection.
This chapter serves for support the recognition of basic rights.
What reason can an individual have to regard another’s interests as deserving of respect, as constraint on his own conduct that he rationally should acknowledge?
Lomasky- Individuals
Rational
Protected
Self-determination
Valores en si mismo- el individuo.
Chapter 111 Projects and the Nature of Ethics
1. project pursuit characteristic of human beings, far from universal.
Certain people, impose moral claims on the rest of us that cannot be dismissed by noting that such beings are incapble of directing their lives in accord with long-range commitments they have autonomously undertaken.
This idealization of one’s own distinctive life situation as a norm for all men is not only myopic but also disreputable. It is a kind of intellectual imperialism by means of which a parochial conception of the good life is advances under the banner of universalism. Pg.38- no entiendo
Ethics is the investigation of rationality justifiable bases for resolving conflicts among persons with divergent aims who share a common world. If there does not exist some interpersonal standard by means of which claims can be scrutinized and compared, morality is impotent.
For morality to weigh the competing claims of diverse individuals, it must be scrupulously neutral among them, that is, impersonal. If project pursuit necessarily entials recognition of personal standards of value to which agents commit themselves, then individuals cannot regard themselves as bound by any one scheme for conflict resolution. Morality breaks down into a sea of competing lciams. The recognition of the primacy of project pursuit is then not a contribution to ethics but instead a line in its obituary.
The rest of the book will be by developing a persuasive account of rights.
Project persuers and other persons
Lomasky offers an account of basic rights that is multivalent.
Each can have its own particular status by virtue of its distinctive properties, and the respective moral weights assigned can vary from the infintesimal to the profound. – who then assigns these moral weights?
One who pursues projects lives a life structured by abiding commitments that determine what will count as a motivation toward action for that person, but no particular motivational structure is presupposed. A project pursuer’s life is coherent over time, but the values around which practical activity cohere are open-ended.
Projects are precisely those motivated dispositions that project themselves temporally through various stages of life and render it one connected life rather than a jumble of discrete episodes. They also project at a time across an individual’s various inducements to act such that the person is more than an arena on which disconnected and warning impulses collide. To the extent that one is attached to certain persisten ends, not all of equal gravity but some central and others subsidiarty, and that one expresses such attachment through appropriate action, then one is a project pursuer.
Someone who asks himself “perhaps I ought to work to overcome my visceral repugnance toward the towrture of innocent persons if I could thereby improve my score on the utilitarian calculus” one who has come to entertain these reflections may be a person whose capacity for autonomous choice has expanded wonderfully, he may also have become morally corrupted.
One’s projects mya, but need to be, the product of explicit deliberation concerning what vision of the good will engage one’s efforts.
Fragmentations of two kinds: (what does this fragmentation comes from)
Indiscriminate Evaluator: the person whose motivational thrusts are so sudden and transient that they elude all our attempts to understand them as emaenating from a common core. –extreme schizophrenia. It represents deviation from the standard of a life that is rendered thoroughly coherent through the persistence of projects.
Postconversion individual: is imbued with drives and allegiances that give his life a definite shape, but they bear no resemablance to those that motivated the preconversion self.
From similar to spontaneous and unexpected conversion is the instutionalized practice of deliberately abandoning one from of life for another.
Changes represent the taking on of radically different commitments that will thenceforward mold the transformed self .
Philosophical normative ethics is the search for rationally justdiable standards for the resolution of interpersonal conflict.
Practical philosophy for aristotles is in the first instance, concerned with the ability of individuals to give to their lives a persistent structure that does not easily bend to opposed enticements, that regularly motivates action and emotion comprehensible by reference to that structure, that serves as a standard of value for the appraisal of competing realizable outcomes. That will provide a basiss for judging wherher a whole human life has been asuccess or a failute, whose value is presupposed by all other judgments of value rather than being consequent upon them, and which is therefore not subject to trade off for the sake of any higher ranking good.
Projects are like aristoteleian virtues in giving motivational structure to a life and in providing the individual a standard of value for practical judgement.
The virtues unlike projects are discovered, rather than created.
Value is prior to commitments, and one does well or ill insofar as ones commitments accurately exemplify or fail to exemplify that value,
Bona fide- reasons for that individual to have chosen the values which would represent his life.
Liberal conception: recognizes in each individual project pursuer value that springs from his ability to generate value thorugh his own personal commitments. He is not merely a placeholder at which external value can express itself.
Enterprise association in which all are united in the pursit of a common goal.