Comments Elsewhere

Richard,

Fair enough.

I’d forgotten your specific position on the nature of moral patient welfare, so I spoke much too loosely. (I didn’t mean to suggest that the issue was paternalism, exactly, in any case.)

In that case we’ll have to precisify my loose talk further than I had precisified it above. The substantive disagreement about what constitutes respecting an individual person then has to do with the sorts of “wishes” (or more precisely, the sorts of considered choices) that you’ve absolutely got to respect, not just the sorts of “interests.”

(And one of the desiderata for libertarian individual rights theories is that the kind of choices in question be specified in such a way that they don’t conflict, thus eliminating the question of whom to sacrifice. How far any given theorist succeeds at that task is, of course, a separate question.)