METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 21, No. 4, August 1990 002k-1068 $2.00

A COMMENT ON THE ARGUMENT BETWEEN GEWIRTH AND HIS CRITICS

STEVEN ROSS

The argument in Allan Gewirth’s Reason and Morality has under- standably come in for a great deal of attention. The idea, roughly, that we have rights to certain generic goods, freedom and well being, and that these rights may be shown to be ours in virtue of the very structure of purposive agency, is at once compelling, straightforward, and as Gewirth’s critics have discovered, not easy to dismiss. In a recent issue of Ethics’, Marcus Singer has charged that any argument like Gewirth’s cannot help but fail to achieve what it sets out to do: successfully derive the claim that we have moral rights to freedom and well being from the generally incontestable claim that simply as agents with plans and desires, we cannot help but want these things and so regard them as necessary goods. The argument Singer offers in support of this verdict has certainly been made before.2 Indeed, Singer himself is quite anxious to draw attention to the sense in which his is a very obvious line of criticism to take; in a way, one that is as old as Hume. I focus on Singer’s version of the anti-Gewirth argument only because it is an unusually clear statement of what is surely a rather widespread conviction regarding foundationalist arguments of the kind Gewirth offers. For whatever it may be worth, Singer hardly finds Gewirth’s argument worthless. On Singer’s view, Gewirth offers us one of the more “ingenious” elucidations of the fact that moral justifications must be understood “transpersonally” if they are to be understood at all. (p. 300) But the centerpiece of Gewirth’s argument, the logical derivation of moral rights from non-moral or purely prudential grounds, is seen as so inconceivable as to be scarcely worth refuting. Singer professes being unable to imagine how someone could even think it might be possible to derive, from simple first person descriptions of need and desire alone, any sort of claim regarding the moral obligations and duties of all. (pp. 298-99) By contrast, Gewirth for his part calmly insists there is no difficulty either with his idea of prudential rights or with his move from ego-centric prudential rights to collective moral

’ Ethics Volume 95 No. 9; January 1985, pp. 297-304. All subsequent page references to this issue.

* See for cxamplc, Alistair MacIntyre After Virtue p. 65; sec also the essays by Jesse Kalin, R. M. Hare and Kai Nielsen in Gewirth’s Ethical Rationalism edited by Edward Regis, Chicago 1984.

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ones. (pp. 303-04) Mutual incomprehensibility of this kind should not surprise us too much. When a philosophy professor is accused of overlooking the most elementary of orthodoxies, we can usually expect the professor to claim in return he has more than successfully anticipated and addressed the difficulty in question, and that his opponents are simply too blinded by dogma to see this. In what follows I want to offer a modest contribution to this seemingly enduring dispute between Gewirth and his critics, for there is I think a way of putting the argument for our rights to freedom and well being that does justice to what is right about Gewirth’s “derivation” as well as to the “no ought from is” objection that is generally made to it. The result though is of more than local interest. What I want to argue for, among other things, is a different account of what the best arguments for our moral right to freedom and well being may be like.

1. A n Initial Distinction To ask whether Gewirth’s argument goes through is to ask essentially two questions. First

(1) What is the relation between (a) my acknowledging freedom and well being to be necessary goods and (b) my claiming a moral right to such things?

And second

(2) Is the idea of a “prudential right”, as Gewirth employs it, a coherent one?

Regarding (l), Gewirth clearly believes that the relation between (la) and (lb) must be presented as one of logical necessity. That is exactly why his argument is so worthy of attention. And he charts out the form this necessity takes via the “bridge” notion of prudential rights plus the extrapolations he claims we can then make given only a certain amount of conceptual analysis and sheer consistency. But before taking up the account Gewirth gives of how we may move from ( la) to (lb), it is worth noting that (1) and (2) are in some important sense independent. We might reject Gewirth’s use of the idea of prudential rights as unsatisfactory, but hold that something like a relation of necessity holds between ( la) and (Ib) on other grounds. To anticipate a bit, something like that will be my view, but not quite, for two reasons. In the first place, the term “necessary”, in this context, is I think misleading. And the reason it is misleading falls out of my positive thesis: I believe we can construe ( la) as constituting incontrovertible support for ( lb) only if we understand the idea of “incontrovertible support” to have a somewhat different structure or “grammar” from the one Gewirth and Singer consider. Gewirth I think is absolutely right on two counts. He is right to

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identify the special status freedom and well being have as primary goods and so the special status they have in the structure of our desires. And he is right to point to this status as constituting the source of our moral rights. He is wrong to think the argument for moral rights can (or more accurately with Gewirth: must) have the structural logic he argues for, and so he is wrong to present the tie between persons necessarily wanting these goods and persons having moral rights as one of entailment or rational necessity.

2. Ge wirth ’s A rgumen tlSinger ’s Criticism Whatever conceptual independence there may be between (1) and ( 2 ) , the claim that ( la) leads necessarily to ( lb) is for Gewirth at least inseparably tied to the argument for attributing “prudential rights” to agents in the first place. It is therefore understandable that a great deal of attention has been focused on how the idea of prudential rights is to be understood and what this notion may or may not be said to entail.

Singer raises all the natural objections to this peculiar hybrid. We all know what it is to speak of a prudential interest. And, when X is in A’s interest, since it is also in A’s interest that B not interfere with his getting or doing X, we can also have no difficulty with A’s saying to B “you ought not interfere with my getting X ’ - no difficulty, that is, so long as we take A to mean something like “I don’t want you to”/”I’d rather you didn’tht will go badly for you if you do” and so on. But to warn or plead with B is clearly very different from establishing B’s having any kind of obligation not to interfere. Indeed, the idea of there being any such “obligation” on B’s part simply because X is in A’s interest seems absurd. It is certainly in my interest that you not tackle me on my way to the end zone, I’d certainly rather you didn’t, and I might even be able to threaten you with injury if you try, but any talk about your “being obligated” not to interfere is clearly impossible. Yet, on Gewith’s view, I am claiming B is obligated not to interfere with my freedom and well being when I claim “prudential rights” to such things. Thus, when I say to others (in virtue of my prudential right to freedom and well being) that “they ought not to interfere with my getting these things”, this “ought” cannot be understood as the coercive warning of prudential rationality. But, the objection continues, if I am not using the expression “you ought not to interfere” in that way, then I must be using it in a moral way to begin with, which is to say, in a way that assumes that if challenged, this claim can be backed up by pointing to considerations of a recognizably moral nature. Quite simply, an argument like Singer’s seems to say, we are faced with something like a grammatical fork: saying we have a prudential interest in freedom and well being is not to say others are obligated not to interfere with this interest; being able to say others are so obligated is we might say woven into the language of moral rights alone.

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3. Getting Gewirth Right There is no question that Singer misrepresents Gewirth’s argument in at least one important respect. Singer represents Gewirth’s argument as follows:

( 1 ) I have a prudential right to freedom and wcll bcing + (2) I have a moral right to freedom and wcll bcing + (3) everyone has a moral right to freedom and well being.

Tn fact, Gewerth’s argument runs:

(4) I have a prudential right to freedom and well bcing + (5) everyone has a prudential right to freedom and well bcing -+ (6) everyone has a moral right to frcedom and well being.

Or: if everyone has prudential rights to generic goods, then everyone has moral rights to such goods. Everyone does have prudential rights to such goods since I have them, and I have them in virtue of what I must acknowledge are transpersonal reasons. Therefore everyone has a moral right to freedom and well being.

It is worth reviewing why the second argument is superior. The first argument has an easy move from (2) to (3), but is faced with insuperable obstacles in the move from (1) to (2). This is why Singer concludes we should see the derivation of moral from prudential rights as “super- fluous - unnecessary baggage distracting from the [genuine] deduction” that holds between claims like (2) and (3). (p. 300) By contrast, the second argument has an easy transition from (4) to ( 5 ) - no one will would deny that if I have prudential rights, then every agent has them. What about the move from ( 5 ) to (6)? Well, the argument goes, if every agent does have prudential rights, then must not every agent, if rational, admit just this fact about all agents? - and voilh: that is exactly what it is to conceed and attribute moral rights to all. Clearly, everything hangs on what goes on when Gewirth talks about “prudential rights” in the first place. If this construction turns out to be an unsatisfactory one, the superiority of the second argument will turn out to be short lived.

4. Prudential Rights What then is a “prudential right”? Does the idea make any clear sense‘? It is just at this point that the dispute between Gewirth and his critics, in this case Singer, tends to be at its most circular. Singer holds fast to what is undeniable: “an ought judgment made by A to uphold his interest does not establish that anyone other than A has any obligation with respect to A doing (getting) X . (p. 300) And so: if prudential interest is all that can be going on, why call this claim a right? What Singer misses is that Gewirth cannot have the slightest desire to dispute him here - indeed, if the idea of a “prudential right” had the implication of a moral

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obligation to begin with, Singer would be right regarding his charge of circularity. We could have no deduction to moral rights, for we would have posited moral rights from the start. (p. 300) Gewirth defends the idea of a non-moral right for myself with a nonmoral obligation implication for others by simply claiming that there is nothing inherently incoherent in such a construction. After all, Singer conceeds that “one person may address an ought judgment to other persons with a view to upholding his, not their, interests”. (p. 303) If this way of speaking is perfectly in order before “ought”, what is to prevent us from extending this understanding to speak of wholly ego-centric, non-moral rights? Gewirth’s talk of “what one may address” to another is to be sure a bit coy. One can say anything to anyone. The question, as Wittgenstein reminds us, is whether a certain expression has a genuine or clear use. And this is to ask: is this expression part of a network of coherent expressions in a language game whose overall point is clear? The more profitable question would then seem to be: “what use might the expression ‘prudential right’ have? What language game might it be a part of?” Gewirth goes some distance towards answering this question when he speaks of an agent’s claiming for himself a prudential right, and so that others ought not to interfere, as something that grows naturally out of simply regarding one’s freedom and well being as central:

For the agent to hold that he has rights to frcedom and well being but that nonetheless it is permissable for other pcrsons to intcrfcre with these would be to remove or at least strongly dilute his conviction that they are necessary goods for him. For in regarding them as necessary for his agency he holds they must be kept inviolate, so that interference with them is impermi~sible.~ [emphasis added]

One can easily find dozens of remarks just like this throughout Reason and Morality. The problem is that without explicitly facing it, Gewirth cannot help importing the very background he pretends to be arguing towurds in order to elucidate his argument. Consider for example the last sentence in the quotation above. How are we to understand the expressions found there? Gewirth tells us over and over again that holding freedom and well being as “necessary” for agency follows simply from tracing out the conceptual features of agency. It is not just that to be an agent is to want these things; we cannot be agents without them. Like everyone else, I find this point wholly incontestable. But what does it does mean to say we must see freedom and well being as “inviolate”, or hold that their violation as “impermissable”? If this way of speaking is no more than a redundancy, the same point again about the necessary conceptual connection between agency on one hand and freedom and well being on the other, then the use of “inviolate” here,

’ See also Allan Gewirth Reason ~ n d Morality, Chicago p. 71 Allan Gewirth Reason and Morality, Chicago, 1978; p. 78.

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though peculiar, would be unobjectionable. But of course this is not how “inviolate” is meant here at all. Gewirth gives us no reason to asume the word is being used in any but its ordinary sense. And this means that unacknowledged in the background here is the very moral universe Gewirth claims to want to deduce. To think of some good or arrangement as being ‘inviolate’ is, as the term is ordinarily used, to think of it as having a certain kind of social status, for example, as being tied to or able to generate a certain sort of claim we can coherently make against others. What else would the term mean if not at least this? We might as well speak of “owning something” while denying any connection to the further claim that one had rights to the use of that thing. To speak of something as “inviolate” is to locate it within a certain kind of social understanding, within a web of social practices. It would hardly be appropriate or natural to translate “inviolate” as “seen as crucial to some purposive organism”. But it is the latter alone that Gewirth at this stage is entitled to speak of.

This point is even more vivid when we turn to “impermissable”. How did the activity, the “form of life” of giving and withholding permission get in here? Presumably, we were just talking about purposive agency. To understand the predicates “permissable”/“impermissable” is to understand their role in a complex social practice. And to understand this practice is to understand the ways in which terms like “permissable” are deeply tied to other social and moral concepts. No one can elucidate how a term like “permissible” functions without rather quickly drawing on concepts like “entitlement”, “legitimate (vs. illegitimate) action” and the like. Anyone who thinks otherwise should try it, as the saying goes. And clearly, if we are going to describe “the goods of pure agency” as tied to this sort of richly social and prescriptive vocabulary to begin with, we can hardly claim to have purged our opening account of all the relevant moral presuppositions. The move from acknowledging such goods to acknowledging moral rights turns out to be no move at all. But in that case of course, we must admit what Gewirth wants so much to deny, that in this argument that begins by allegedly thinking simply about agency and action, we are in fact deeply within the moral from the start. Hence we must plead guilty to the charge of circularity. Nor is this difficulty one Gewirth could surmount with but a bit more care. For suppose he were to purge his opening conception of agency of every link to every social or moral practice. He would then escape the charge of circularity, but in doing so, he would also have robbed the idea of “prudential rights” of any coherent use, and then the argument could not even begin.

5. Good and Bad Arguments From Freedom and Well Being to Rights The problem is I think not that Gewirth has the wrong characterisation of agency. Nor is it that he has the wrong conception of moral rights. I

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think he is right about both. It is that has the wrong conception of what an argument that supports our rights claim in virtue of what is true of purposive agency must look like. Certainly we are agents, and certainly as agents we must want that which is necessary to any purposive action. The problem lies in how we proceed from there. For both Gewirth and Singer, the question is whether rights are somehow derivable from the start, already within our account of things once we do no more than acknowledge agency and subject this acknowledgement to the right sort of conceptual analysis. I suggest we take an altogether different tack.

Suppose we begin by granting the brute facts of human agency: persons must if rational hold freedom and well being to be necessary goods. The idea of everyone’s having a moral right to freedom and well being should then be understood not as somehow “packed into agency as such”, or “willed all a l ~ n g ” ; ~ rather, we should see this rights claim as a political or moral device we construct at this stage in the argument which we then defend as a construction. The claim then is that this construction - the attribution of a moral right to freedom and well being to all -is better than any other in handling or mirroring these facts about human agency and desire once these facts are thought of as projected on to a political or social context. Thus moral rights to freedom and well being are not to be seen as something we are already committed to once we conceed human agency, generic goods, or rationality. That way of putting the argument never works (or “works” only if we invent certain highly suspicious hybrid notions like “prudential rights” in order to fudge on what these notions of pure agency really do commit us to). Here the Humean line is dead right. But Gewirth, and others like him, is certainly right to find the other horn of the Humean analysis quite unsatisfactory. It is not as if moral rights claims on behalf of others and ourselves can be straightforwardly assimilated to those which are grounded in nothing more than custom or positive law. They cannot, and any attempt to present our moral rights along those lines only generates extremely counterintuitive results. It cannot be denied that persons have some pre-social description simply in virtue of being agents, and this description cannot “entail nothing” with respect to our having moral rights. 1 am suggesting that the best way to accommodate this (I believe correct) conviction regarding the special force or authority of moral rights claims is to see rights as not unlike the mercator projection these facts about human agency make whey these facts are projected on to the screen of social life and appropriately transformed there. We do want generic goods if we want anything at all; Gewirth is right to $tress that nothing could rival these in importance to us. Hence only the idea of a “right” here could “fit” or match the sort of importance this is. But this is obviously not a deduction because we are

The last expression is Singer’s; see p. 300

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representing one kind of fact (about agency, choice, generic goods and so forth) in another mode or context (where the question is what is permissable, or legitimate, or possible). That we cannot, I suggest, imagine a better way to acknowledge or capture these facts about agency and generic goods - that is to say, no other moral or political construction can represent these facts so well - is what underlies the intuition that rights are fundamental, “natural”. And in this sense (“the most natural fit”) perhaps they are. But they are not natural in the sense that we can “deduce” or show ourselves to be “previously committed to” moral rights by considerations of rational agency alone.

This I suggest is the sense in which the “no ought form is” caveat both is and is not correct, at least with respect to rights (the ought) and agency (the is). If we start with the non-moral language game (choice/ agencylgeneric goods), we cannot be forced on pain of logical inconsistency to move to the moral one (rights/obligations). But if we are to make this move, traverse this spacc, then we must admit two things. First, that those things picked out in our non-moral language game must be represented from the moral point of view one way or another. Second, that these non-moral facts about persons can be represented from the moral point of view in better or worse ways - can, in the case of rational agency (the non-moral fact) and rights (the moral point of view), admit of a “best” representation. But to make this claim on behalf of rights is only to say the idea of rights is superior in this respect to all of its rivals as a way of representing persons in the moral sphere. It is not to say there is something in the nature of agency as such that somehow “requires” this idea. If these descriptions of human nature are granted, as they must be, and if we are to think of persons morally, as we certainly shall in so far as we are at all interested in anything resembling a full description of persons, then it can be argued that there is no rival construction that can mirror or accommodate this feature as well as rights. At the very least then, the one who seeks to challenge this way of arguing for the existence of natural, inalienable rights must offer what he claims is a better representation of this fact in its place. When the argument is put this way, it is no longer appropriate to challenge “the move itself” from human agency to moral rights. Nor will it do to point out that human agency talk “fails to require” moral rights talk. That much has been acknowledged from the start. The question i s how well do we make this move, not are we logically required to make it at all. Another way to put this argument would be to say that to think of fully empowered, purposive agents socially or morally just is to think of them with rights, or it is not to think of them when within this point of view satisfactorily. Once we think of man in the social context, living and competing with others, we have the best reasons to structure our sense of what is and what is not permissable in just this way. But again, this is not to “deduce” rights claims from

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agency; it is only to point out that given we are agents, and given we can consider a variety of social or moral arrangements, no other arrange- ment (no arrangement other than one which at least recognizes or protects equal rights to freedom and well being) can possibly address or mirror this fact about us quite so well. Perhaps this is not so far from saying: given our desires for amorous or intimate experience, no world which failed to accommodate this desire would be one we could make much sense of, or could be one in which we would find ourselves at home. Indeed. But we cannot provc or deduce the existence of family or loved ones from any premise that states we have these desires. We can only explain, given that these are objects of desire do exist, why they mean so much to us. Gewirth then explains why rights matter. He errs in taking the source of their importance as the deductive touchstone that generates their existence.

Hunter CollegelCUNY New York, N Y 10021 USA

References

Allan Gewirth, Reason and Morality, Chicago, 1978. Allan Gewirth, “From the Prudential to the Moral,” Ethics, Vol. 95,

Alistair MacIntyre, After Virtue. Edward Regis, ed., Gewirth’s Ethicul Rationalism, Chicago, 1984. Marcus Singer, “On Gewirth’s Derivation of the Principle of Generic

1985, pp. 302-304.

Consistency”, Ethics, Vol. 95, 1985, pp. 297-301.