Comments Elsewhere

Dave,

I’m afraid that you may have confused things more than you have illuminated them.

This argument is not primarily an argument about empirical psychology. It’s about ethics. It may well be that Joe has views about the psychology of motivation that are different from those that natural rights folks such as Kennedy or I have. But the meat of the dispute is over value, not people’s psychological motivations. It’s not over what people are or are not motivated to seek, but rather what it is good or bad for people to seek. Unfortunately, in this vale of tears, the two aren’t always coextensive.

Joe:

He [John Stuart Mill] spends most of Utilitarianism rejecting appeals to intuitions, and while he is less dogmatic in his rejection of natural rights theory than is his godfather, he nevertheless does reject it.

Mill rejects something that he calls “the intuitive school of ethics”, which he associates with deontological theories, but I don’t know why you are leaning on this. Intuitionistic method is neither necessary for endorsing natural rights theory (cf. John Locke, Ayn Rand, Jan Narveson, etc.) nor sufficient for rejecting utilitarianism (cf. Francis Hutcheson, Henry Sidgwick). I’m personally quite comfortable with intuitionistic method, but many if not most natural rights theorists aren’t, and my influences on that score actually come more from consequentialists (Francis Hutcheson, G. E. Moore) than from deontologists.

Maybe you think that natural rights go along with intuitionistic method because you need to grasp at some sort of mystical revelation at some point to support the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo that you think natural rights theory requires. But if so, you can hardly expect either natural rights theorists or intuitionists to agree with the picture you present.

In any case, given the dispute between you and Kennedy over what file to drop J.S. Mill into, maybe it would help to clarify terms a bit. What do you think are the necessary components of a “natural rights” theory? Which of those do you think Mill fails to endorse?

(Kennedy, the same question, mutatis mutandis, goes for you.)