An introduction to rights by William A. Edmundson

Author:William A. Edmundson [Edmundson, William A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780521008709
Publisher: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Published: 2011-01-09T08:55:19.523000+00:00

Universal Declaration, Revolt Against Utilitarianism 113

Idealized decision principles from mathematically rigorous theories of rational choice come into play here. Certain principles will seem almost trivial: rational agents will seek consistency in their beliefs and their preferences will be transitive – that is, rational agents will not at a given time prefer C to A if they prefers A to B and B to C. Rational agents will have to deal with risk and uncertainty, and so principles have to be stipulated to govern their reasoning in this respect. Of particular importance is the rational agent’s attitude toward risk. Individuals might be represented as straightforward maximizers of individual net-expected utility – that is, as preferring the choice having the highest payoff after discounting for the chance of the payoff ’s not being realized. Alternatively, individuals might be represented as minimizers of “worst case” individual disutility – that is, as avoiders of choices that involve catastrophic, even though unlikely, negative outcomes for themselves.

At the third stage, the contractualist derives rules that rational individuals would agree to by applying principles of rational choice in the circumstances of morality. A sample derivation might go this way: There is a moral rule against committing fraud, even where an agent can attain his most highly valued outcome only by employing fraud. Why would anyone agree to such a rule? Answer: Rational agents perceive that in a world in which fraud is practiced, they stand to lose more by being defrauded than they stand to gain by practicing it, and so they agree to foreswear the use of fraud on the condition that others do so as well. Other rational agents, reasoning similarly, agree to foreswear the use of fraud on the same conditions. Further, rational agents agree to institute sanctions against fraud to deter deviations from the norm of “no fraud.” A norm of “no fraud” would thus be agreed to, no contrary norm of laissez-faire toward fraud could be agreed to, and the absence of a norm would not be a preferred outcome for rational agents. Therefore the moral rule against fraud is compelled by reason. QED.

As sketched, the contractualist account of the moral rule against fraud is open to an obvious objection: What reason does a self-interested agent have to comply with the rule even when he calculates that he can commit fraud with impunity? This is not the place to trace the efforts contractualists have made to resolve this basic difficulty, often referred to as the compliance problem. Nor is this the place to address the difficulty posed by the economist John Harsanyi’s (1977) contractualist argument leading 114

The Second Expansionary Era

to the adoption of utilitarianism – obviously, contractualism fails as an alternative to consequentialism if on its own terms it could justify a version of consequentialism. Instead, for our purposes, it is more important to notice some other deficiencies of any attempt to give a purely contractualist account of rights.

One difficulty arises from the fact that the contractualist structure generates intuitively repugnant outcomes unless the original choice situation is adjusted to guarantee fairness.

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