SOUTHERN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY SUMMER, 1968

of any special merit or worth to so- ciety or contractual agreements, etc.) , rights which they have whether they are Nazis or homosexuals or saints. Ex- plicated along these lines, the “respect for persons” rule might be formulated in this way:

(a) “X (where X is an action or policy of action) is unjust to Y” or as Professor Kent would perhaps prefer, “X violates Y’s personhood,” means “X violated Y’s human rights.”

The problem with this explication, of course, is that of justifying which rights are human rights.

Here is another possible explication: (b) “X is unjust to Y” or “ X vio-

lates Y’s personhood” means “X vio- lates or denies Y’s basic human needs.”

The problem on this explication is the specification of basic human needs as opposed to other needs which are not essential, perhaps even the formula- tion of some sort of basic, minimal standard conditions of living for all human beings. The difficulties here are obvious, since the concept of need is in part normative.

There are grounds, I believe, for treating (a) and (b) as roughly equiv-

alent, namely, for treating equality of treatment with need-criteria emphasis as roughly the same thesis that all men have human rights. I will not argue this point here, but Professor Kent’s statement, that “the shift from the nine- teenth century ideology of justice as fairness to justice as respect for per- son is precisely reflected in the extensive legal reforms in our society . . .”’ could well be read as an accurate historical statement if the explications of justice in either (a) or (b) were substituted in that sentence for the phrase “justice as respect for person.”

I mentioned earlier that problems re- main with these alternatives. Those problems center around the possible ar- bitrariness in the specification of basic human needs or even in the choice of need-citeria as opposed to merit-criteria and so on, and in specifying which rights are human rights. Professor Kent refers to what he calk a “slough of emotivism” in Perelman’s position. Given my present metaethical leanings, I well may fall into that slough, at a certain level of analysis. Like Professor Kent, I am skeptical about the de- scriptivist metaethic of traditional nat- ural law theory.

‘Response to Professor Blackstone’s Comments” EDWARD KENT

Professor Blackstone’s primary objec- tion to my paper, that I (or perhaps more justly Mill) fail in the “task of providing a substantive but non-arbi- trary rule of justice,” I think is well taken. However, perhaps this failure is implicit in the dominant stance of the paper which militates against the adequacy of any formal rule criterion of justice. Certainly, if the paper’s as- sumption that the (or a) primary mean- ing of justice is based upon the plea of injustice, no appeal to a common standard (‘consent’ formula) will ade- quately do the trick of elucidation. For this reason I would reject both of Pro- fessor Blackstone’s substitute formulae

(“Human rights,” “human needs”) which would seem to entail such mini- mal agreed criteria. The notorious but illuminating feature of William James’ social interest terms, claims and de- mands, is that they allow both fot agreement and disagreement as to what is just-unjust in the resolution of the particular case. My own formula- tion of justice as respect for person at- tempted to recognize and accommodate this fundamental ambiguity in the con- cept of justice.

Once again, justice is only some- times just, i.e. when all relevant parties’ claims are satisfied.

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