The Right To An Adequate Standard Of Living: Justice, Autonomy, And The Basic Needs

Social Philosophy and Policy

Volumn 9, Issue 1, 1992, Pages 231-261

  Copp, David ^a  

^a NONE   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 84974101533     PISSN: 02650525     EISSN: 14716437     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0265052500003666     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. assume that those who drafted the Declaration were following the rule according to which the pronoun “he” and its cognates are read as gender-neutral when the context permits. I follow the same rule in the present paper to conform to this volume's style guidelines. The Universal Declaration was adopted on December 10, 1948, by the General Assembly of the United Nations. It is reprinted, for example, in A. I. Melden, Human Rights (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1970), pp. 143–49.
2. Robert Nozick expresses a libertarian view in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
3. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 7, 64–65.
4. See Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. xi, 91–92, 188–92. See also Richard Wasserstrom, “Rights, Human Rights, and Racial Discrimination, ” ed. David Lyons, Rights (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1977), pp. 46–57.
5. See David Lyons's introduction to ed. Lyons, Rights, pp. 1–4. Joel Feinberg uses the idea of a claim in explaining the idea of a right in his “The Nature and Value of Rights, ” ed. Lyons, Rights, pp. 78–91, at pp. 84–85. Wasserstrom speaks of rights as entitlements in his “Rights, Human Rights, and Racial Discrimination, ” p. 48.
6. Feinberg relates respect for rights to respect for persons in his “The Nature and Value of Rights, ” p. 87. See also Thomas E. Hill, Jr., “Servility and Self-Respect, ” Rights, pp. 111–24. Steve Munzer suggested the importance of self-esteem. See also David Sachs, “How to Distinguish Self-Respect from Self-Esteem, ” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 10 (1981), pp. 346–60.
7. L. W. Sumner, The Moral Foundation of Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 16–17.
8. Ibid., p. 47. Robert Nozick distinguished between goals and side constraints and argued that rights should be taken as constraints. But he allowed that rights could be treated as goals in a kind of “utilitarianism of rights.” He thought it would be a moral mistake to view rights this way, not a conceptual mistake. See his Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 28–33.
9. The argument is sketched by Jeremy Waldron in his introduction to ed. Waldron, Theories of Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 11.
10. See ibid., p. 9; Sumner, The Moral Foundation of Rights, pp. 42-46; H. L. A. Hart, Essays on Bentham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), ch. 7.
11. Sumner, The Moral Foundation of Rights, p. 46.
12. As Hart realized, for example, in proposing the account. See his Essays on Bentham, ch. 7. See also Waldron in Theories of Rights, p. 9, n. 21.
13. have addressed some of these issues in the following papers: “Collective Actions and Secondary Actions, ” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 3 (July 1979), pp. 177-86; “Hobbes on Artificial Persons and Collective Actions, ” The Philosophical Review, vol. 89, no. 4 (October 1980), pp. 579-606; “Do Nations Have the Right of Self-Determination?”, ed. Stanley G. French, Philosophers Look at Canadian Confederation (Montreal: Canadian Philosophical Association, 1979), pp. 71-95; “What Collectives Are: Agency, Individualism and Legal Theory, ” Dialogue, vol. 23, no. 2 (June 1984), pp. 249-69; “The Concept of Society, ” Dialogue, forthcoming.
14. See Rodney Peffer, “A Defense of Rights to Well-Being, ” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 8 (1978), pp. 65–87, at p. 71.
15. Ibid.
16. Richard J. Arneson, Liberalism, Distributive Subjectivism, and Equal Opportunity for Welfare, ” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 19 (1990), pp. 158–94. Ronald Dworkin, “What is Equality? Part 1: Equality of Welfare” and “What is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources, ” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 10 (1981), pp. 185–246 and pp. 283–345. David Braybrooke, Meeting Needs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 143–50, 293–301.
17. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. I should mention that Rawls intends to set aside the problem of costly needs as a “difficult complication.” He claims only to deal with “the fundamental case” of a society in which “no one suffers from unusual needs” and “all citizens are fully cooperating members. over the course of a complete life.” It is nevertheless worth pointing out the implications of the difference principle for cases in which there are people with costly needs. See John Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory: The Dewey Lectures 1980, ” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 77 (1980), p. 546.
18. Virginia Held makes essentially the same point in her Rights and Goods: Justifying SocialAction (New York: The Free Press, 1984), p. 187.
19. Amartya Sen discusses “variable conversion rates of primary goods into achievements” in his “Justice: Means versus Freedoms, ” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 19 (1990), pp. 118. The issue here is variable conversion rates of primary goods into the satisfaction of needs. On this issue, see also Amartya Sen, The Standard of Living, ed. Geoffrey Hawthorn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 18.
20. Virginia Held proposes a similar reading of the right in her Rights and Goods, pp. 184–85.
21. See Amartya Sen, The Standard of Living.
22. Ibid., pp. 8, 11. Sen comments on p. 11: “The battered slave, the broken unemployed, the hopeless destitute, the tamed housewife, may have the courage to desire little, but the fulfillment of those disciplined desires is not a sign of great success.
23. Richard Ameson proposes to answer Sen's objection by invoking hypothetical desires. He also proposes to invoke considerations about the conditions under which desires are formed to avoid the worry about conditioning. But I submit we already know enough about a person who is “poor, exploited, overworked and ill” to know that he does not have a standard of living adequate for his health and well-being. We do not have to inquire into the conditions under which his desires were formed. See Arneson's “Liberalism, Distributive Subjectivism, and Equal Opportunity for Welfare, ” pp. 163, 167–70.
24. Sen, The Standard of Living, p. 14, quoting A. C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare (London: Macmillan, 1952), p. 759.
25. Ibid., pp. 15–16.
26. Ibid., p. 16.
27. There are discussions of the distinction in many places. For a particularly good discussion, see Garrett Thomson, Needs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), pp. 1–10. Occasional needs could also be called “instrumental needs, ” but this term may be misleading, since basic needs are also instrumental to achieving one's goals.
28. The term comes from David Braybrooke, Meeting Needs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
29. Richard Arneson says, however, “The conviction that mere preferences are analytically distinguishable from true human needs may prove to be illusory.” See Arneson, “Liberalism, Distributive Subjectivism, and Equal Opportunity for Welfare, ” p. 191. The distinction is discussed by several authors, including Braybrooke, Meeting Needs; David Wiggins, “Claims of Need, ” in his Needs, Values, Truth (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 1-57; Garrett Thomson, Needs, pp. 98–107.
30. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 62, 90–95.
31. The list is adapted from David Braybrooke, Meeting Needs, p. 36.
32. David Wiggins, “Claims of Need, ” p. 15, also p. 10. See also Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973), p. 111; D. W. Stampe, “Need, ” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 66 (1988), p. 135.
33. Garrett Thomson, Needs, p. 8.
34. Braybrooke, Meeting Needs, pp. 31, 48.
35. I developed this idea in somewhat more detail in “Reason and Needs.
36. Virginia Held stresses this point in Rights and Goods, pp. 184–87.
37. will not attempt to explore Hobbesian contractarian arguments, but Gregory Kavka uses a form of Hobbesian argument to argue for the right of disabled persons to work, which may perhaps be viewed as a corollary of The Right, in “Disability and the Right to Work.” It should be noted, however, that Kavka's conception of the constraints on such arguments differs significantly from the conceptions of other contractarians, such as Jan Narveson and David Gauthier. See Narveson's The Libertarian Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), and David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). I discuss what I take to be fundamental problems with Hobbesian arguments of the sort used by Gauthier in my “Contractarianism and Moral Skepticism, ” ed. Peter Vallentyne, Contractarianism and Rational Choice: Essays on Gauthier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
38. This argument depends crucially, however, on the claim that those in the original position would choose on the basis of the “maximin” choice rule, which is of course controversial. Rawls explains and gives the rationale for maximin in A Theory of Justice, pp. 152ff. Kavka's Rawlsian and Hobbesian contractarian arguments assume that the contractors are risk-averse and would at least tend to insure against worst outcomes. See his “Disability and the Right to Work.
39. This view is sketched by Waldron in ed. Waldron, Theories of Rights, pp. 9–10, 12–14. Waldron credits the theory to D. N. MacCormick, “Rights in Legislation, ” ed. P. M. S. Hacker and J. Raz, Law, Morality and Society: Essays in Honour of H. L. A. Hart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 192ff.
40. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 167–74. I cannot attempt to deal fully with Nozick's objection here.
41. Ibid., ch. 2.