Comments Elsewhere

william:

I’m interested in the rights-ist take on all this. … I’m a long time intuitive supporter of nuclear proliferation into the hands of individuals (albeit hopefully at some as yet undetermined time in the future after everyone has evolved into enlightened anarchs)

Well, either people have an unconditional right to possession of atomic weapons or they don’t. If they lean towards the position that you say you intuitively support, then the rights-based case is pretty easy to make out. (Right to nonviolently possess powerful tools as long as you don’t threaten to use them aggressively against any identifiable victims, etc.)

If you lean more towards a position that would allow forcible disarmament, then the challenge is to come up with a non-strictly-consequentialist argument to the effect that it doesn’t violate the rights of the person being disarmed. That’s a lot harder but I don’t think it’s impossible. (Presumably it would have something to do with the lack of possible non-aggressive uses for currently-feasible sorts of atomic weapons and some conception of a standing threat. And presumably you could make out much the same case against, say, private possession of some killer nanoplague. If we’re imagining near-future-plausible but not-yet-actual situations where there would be some non-aggressive use — e.g. asteroid demolition, low-yield weapons, whatever — then that would tend to undermine the rights-based case for forcible disarmament in those cases. But it’d also tend to undermine the demand for such a case, since those are just cases where it looks like the intuitive demand for forcible disarmament is as weak as the theoretical case for its legitimacy.)

For someone like Roderick, who holds that considerations about what has good or bad results can actually play a role in deliberation about what rights people have (and vice versa, in deliberation about what would count as a good or bad result), there are a lot of further nuances that I haven’t mentioned.

Either way, it seems to me like this issue is probably orthogonal to the consequentialist-natural rights debate. Or if it’s angled a bit, the angle actually would tend to tilt rightsers more towards your own expressed position than it would consequentialists.