Although appeals to rights have been common since the great 18th-century declarations of the rights of man (see Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen; Declaration of Independence), most ethical theorists have treated rights as something that must be derived from more basic ethical principles or else from accepted social and legal practices. However, beginning in the late 20th century, especially in the United States, rights were commonly appealed to as a fundamental moral principle. Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), by the American philosopher Robert Nozick (1938–2002), is an example of such a rights-based theory, though it is mostly concerned with applications in the political sphere and says very little about other areas of normative ethics. Unlike Rawls, who for all his disagreement with utilitarianism was still a consequentialist of sorts, Nozick was a deontologist. The rights to life, liberty, and legitimately acquired property are absolute, he insists; no act that violates them can be justified, no matter what the circumstances or the consequences. Nozick also held that one has no duty to help those in need, no matter how badly off they may be, provided that their neediness is not one’s fault. Thus, governments may appeal to the generosity of the rich, but they may not tax them against their will in order to provide relief for the poor.
Robert Nozick.Harvard University News Office
The American philosopher Ronald Dworkin argued for a different view in Taking Rights Seriously (1977) and subsequent works. Dworkin agreed with Nozick that rights should not be overridden for the sake of improved welfare: rights are, he said, “trumps” over ordinary consequentialist considerations. In Dworkin’s theory, however, the rights to equal concern and respect are fundamental, and observing these rights may require one to assist others in need. Accordingly, Dworkin’s view obliges the state to intervene in many areas to ensure that rights are respected.
In its emphasis on equal concern and respect, Dworkin’s theory was part of a late 20th-century revival of interest in Kant’s principle of respect for persons. This principle, like the value of justice, was often said to be ignored by utilitarians. Rawls invoked Kant’s principle when setting out the underlying rationale of his theory of justice. The principle, however, suffers from a certain vagueness, and attempts to develop it into something more specific that could serve as the basis of a complete ethical theory have not been wholly successful. Natural law ethics
During most of the 20th century, most secular moral philosophers considered natural law ethics to be a lifeless medieval relic, preserved only in Roman Catholic schools of moral theology. In the late 20th century the chief proponents of natural law ethics continued to be Roman Catholic, but they began to defend their position with arguments that made no explicit appeal to religious beliefs. Instead, they started from the claim that there are certain basic human goods that should not be acted against in any circumstances. The list of goods offered by John Finnis in the aforementioned Natural Law and Natural Rights, for example, included life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, friendship, practical reasonableness, and religion. The identification of these goods is a matter of reflection, assisted by the findings of anthropologists. Furthermore, each of the basic goods is regarded as equally fundamental; there is no hierarchy among them.
It would, of course, be possible to hold a consequentialist ethics that identified several basic human goods of equal importance and judged actions by their tendency to produce or maintain these goods. Thus, if life is a good, any action that led to a preventable loss of life would, other things being equal, be wrong. Proponents of natural law ethics, however, rejected this consequentialist approach; they insisted that it is impossible to measure the basic goods against each other. Instead of relying on consequentialist calculations, therefore, natural law ethics assumed an absolute prohibition of any action that aims directly against any basic good. The killing of the innocent, for instance, is always wrong, even in a situation where, somehow, killing one innocent person is the only way to save thousands of innocent people. What is not adequately explained in this rejection of consequentialism is why the life of one innocent person cannot be measured against the lives of a thousand innocent people—assuming that nothing is known about any of the people involved except that they are innocent.
Natural law ethics recognizes a special set of circumstances in which the effect of its absolute prohibitions would be mitigated. This is the situation in which the so-called doctrine of double effect would apply. If a pregnant woman, for example, is found to have a cancerous uterus, the doctrine of double effect allows a doctor to remove it, notwithstanding the fact that such action would kill the fetus. This allowance is made not because the life of the woman is regarded as more valuable than the life of the fetus, but because in removing the uterus the doctor is held not to aim directly at the death of the fetus; instead, its death is an unwanted and indirect side effect of the laudable act of removing a diseased organ. In cases where the only way of saving the woman’s life is by directly killing the fetus, the doctrine provides a different answer. Before the development of modern obstetric techniques, for example, the only way of saving a woman whose fetus became lodged during delivery was to crush the fetus’s skull. Such a procedure was prohibited by the doctrine of double effect, for in performing it the doctor would be directly killing the fetus. This position was maintained even in cases where the death of the mother would certainly also bring about the death of the fetus. In these cases, the claim was made that the doctor who killed the fetus directly would be guilty of murder, but the deaths from natural causes of the mother and the fetus would not be his doing. The example is significant, because it indicates the lengths to which proponents of natural law ethics were prepared to go in order to preserve the absolute nature of their prohibitions. Virtue ethics
In the last two decades of the 20th century, there was a revival of interest in the Aristotelian idea that ethics should be based on a theory of the virtues rather than on a theory of what one ought to do. This revival was influenced by Elizabeth Anscombe and stimulated by Philippa Foot, who in essays republished in Virtues and Vices (1978) explored how acting ethically could be in the interest of the virtuous person. The Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, in his pessimistic work After Virtue (1980), lent further support to virtue ethics by suggesting that what he called “the Enlightenment Project” of giving a rational justification of morality had failed. In his view, the only way out of the resulting moral confusion was to ground morality in a tradition, such as the tradition represented by Aristotle and Aquinas.
Virtue ethics, in the view of its proponents, promised a reconciliation of morality and self-interest. If, for example, generosity is a virtue, then a virtuous person will desire to be generous; and the same will hold for the other virtues. If acting morally is acting as a virtuous human being would act, then virtuous human beings will act morally because that is what they are like, and that is what they want to do. But this point again raised the question of what human nature is really like. If virtue ethicists hope to develop an objective theory of the virtues, one that is valid for all human beings, then they are forced to argue that the virtues are based on a common human nature; but, as was noted above in the discussion of naturalism in ethics, it is doubtful that human nature can serve as a standard of what one would want to call morally correct or desirable behaviour. If, on the other hand, virtue ethicists wish to base the virtues on a particular ethical tradition, then they are implicitly accepting a form of ethical relativism that would make it impossible to carry on ethical conversations with other traditions or with those who do not accept any tradition at all.