Hillel Steiner

The Natural Right to the Means of Production

Affirmations that there are natural rights typically provoke queries as to which rights they are. And it has been the lack of convincing answers that has, understandably, engendered much if not all of the scepticism with which such affirmations are frequently greeted. Perhaps the only unexceptionable claim that can be registered about the subject of human or natural rights is that agreement on their existence is more widespread than is agreement on their identity. Philosophical attempts to vindicate them-that is, attempts to display the intelligibility of the concept of natural rights-are, at best, necessarily confined to grounding their existence on the formal features of rights-claims in general. Such arguments cannot extend to a further demonstration that rights-claims themselves enjoy, not merely an historically important, but also a logically entrenched position in moral discourse.1 Our acknowledgement of the aspect of personal inviolability implied in any justified rights-claim is a moral and not a conceptual judgement. To say this is not, however, to say that we are debarred from engaging in fruitful reasoning about the content of natural or human rights. For within these limits, it can be and has been shown that any such rights must possess certain properties. Being presupposed by contractual and conventional rights, natural rights can (trivially) be characterized as non-contractual and non-conventional.2 That is, the individual entitlements they prescribe cannot accrue to their possessor by virtue of some action he or another has previously performed. Being in this sense undeserved, such rights must evidently accrue to their possessor by virtue of what he or she is-technically a moral agent, more conventionally a human being. And this in turn implies two further properties commonly ascribed to such rights: namely, that they are universal and inalienable. These rights accrue to beings if they are human and are theirs so long as they are human.3 What I shall try to show in this paper is that one can go some distance toward specifying the content of human or natural rights, by considering the conditions under which a set of rights can be universally and inalienably

A Liberal Theory of Exploitation

A common suggestion is that liberalism intrinsically lacks an adequate theory of exploitation. Eschewing any conception of objective value or human needs, agnostic as between different tastes and preferences, dismissive of irreducibly holist or functionalist explanations of social interaction, it commits itself only to the primacy of personal rights and liberties and to individual choice as the basic explanatory datum of social phenomena. Such an impoverished commitment, it is claimed, renders liberalism conceptually incapable of either identifying or abolishing many significant forms of exploitation. The argument which follows aims to refute this claim. I

May Lockean Doughnuts Have Holes? The Geometry of Territorial Jurisdiction: A Response to Nine

The traditional Lockean account of a states territorial rights construes them as arising from, and coextensive with, the property rights of whichever set of landowners mutually contract to form that state. The coherence of this individualistic account has recently been challenged by Cara Nine. I argue that the reasons offered in support of that incoherence charge are unpersuasive.

Directed Duties and Inalienable Rights

This essay advances and defends two claims: (a) that rights cannot be inalienable and (b) that even if they could be, this would not be morally justifiable.

How equality matters

THE £50,000 settlement which ended the race discrimination case brought by former ward manager Nargis Firdous against the Bethlem and Maudsley Trust is a further reminder of how difficult it is for ethnic minority nurses working in the NHS.

Freedom and bivalence

As has been true of so many others, my own first encounter with Felix Oppenheims path-breaking work, Dimensions of Freedom, proved to be a watershed in the development of my thinking on this subject. Even now, over thirty years later, it continues to illuminate and inspire reflection on the profound complexity of that concept.

Greed and Fear

This essay argues that the proffered grounds for Cohens rejection of market relations – that they are sustained by the base motives of greed and fear – are unsound and also unnecessary to explain the maximising behaviour induced by those relations.

Choice and Circumstance

A common characteristic of virtually all the approaches to the ethics of social arrangements that have stood the test of time is to want equality of something … They are all ‘egalitarians’ in some essential way … To see the battle as one between those ‘in favour of’ and those ‘against’ equality (as the problem is often posed in the literature) is to miss something central to the subject.1 In my view, sufficient heed has yet to be given to this claim, advanced by Amartya Sen. For much current argument in moral and political philosophy still reflects the tendency casually to consign theories to egalitarian or anti-egalitarian categories, the customary litmus test being that of how closely a theory’s normative conclusions approach something like equality of well-being. And nowhere has this tendency been more evident than in the common presumption that libertarian theories are inherently anti-egalitarian. However, and due in no small measure to the influence of Ronald Dworkin’s writings, the soundness of this general taxonomy has increasingly been placed in doubt.2 One key factor in advancing this doubt has been the desire, on the part of many egalitarian thinkers, to introduce considerations of personal responsibility into their accounts of just distribution.

Double-Counting Inequalities

Philippe Van Parijs has argued that, in a globalizing economy, acquiring a second language, additional to ones native language, is more necessary for some persons than others — and that this asymmetric bilingualism is a form of injustice which should be rectified by a more equitable global sharing of the costs of second-language acquisition. This article responds by suggesting that (1) since native languages have geographic locations, and (2) since locations with less globally useful native languages thereby sustain lowered living costs, then (3) the costs which persons incur, in acquiring a second, more globally useful language, may already be offset by the lower costs they incur by virtue of their living in a location with a less globally useful native language. Hence, theories of justice (such as Van Parijss) that require the egalitarian redistribution of locational values would impose, rather than remedy, an injustice by redistributing second-language-acquisition costs.

The right to trade in human body parts

This essay challenges the coherence of arguments brought in support of prohibiting the sale of human body parts. Considerations of neither social utility nor individual rights nor avoidance of exploitation seem sufficient to ground such a prohibition. Indeed, they may be sufficient to invalidate it.