Chapter Five
Responsibilities and Rights

A. I. Meldin says that to establish the existence of rights "we need nothing more than the concept of persons, whose features as the moral agents they are suffice for the possession by them of their fundamental moral rights."1 The Robert Nozick of Anarchy, State, and Utopia held that rights obtain simply by virtue of persons' "separate existences."2 As Ronald Dworkin has shown, John Rawls relies for the plausibility of his "original position" upon the shared presupposition by persons in that position that they are bearers of rights, beginning with the right to equality.3 And Dworkin in his own general theory of rights says that the basic right to "equal concern and respect" is "axiomatic," that it is an "intuitive notion" that cannot be demonstrated but must be "assumed."4

Beneath important differences, the political theories of the four thinkers we have just cited are all "liberal" in that they are rights-based. According to the definition by Leo Strauss (for example), liberalism is "that political doctrine which regards as the fundamental political fact the rights, as distinguished from the duties, of man and which identifies the function of the state with the protection or the safeguarding of those rights."5

What the citations exhibit is that within the liberal tradition the existence of rights is not demonstrated, it is presupposed. The rights of individuals are "God given," or "intuitively self-evident," or included in what it is to be a human being by stipulative definition. Insofar as the question "Why rights?" is the request for the grounds of rights, it finds

no answer in classical liberalism, for which rights are themselves the ground of the political theory. To ask for their grounds is to seek a prior starting point, which is to say that the request is illegitimate within the framework of liberalism. So well is this understood that H. L. A. Hart is exceptional among liberals for his caveat, "... if only we could find some sufficiently firm foundations for such rights."6

In this chapter we will endeavor to provide grounds for the rights of individuals, and from what has just been said it will be clear that in doing so we will be leaving the confines of liberalism in its classical definition. Our argument is that rights derive from responsibilities. This approach signifies the exchange of liberalism's "rights-primitive" conception of the individual for a "responsibilities-primitive" conception. By "primitive" I mean "logically primitive" as distinguished from "logically derivative." Liberalism's conception of the individual is rights-primitive in that it includes rights, but not responsibilities, in its irreducibly minimum conception of the individual human being. On the other hand eudaimonistic moral and political theory is responsibilities-primitive, including responsibilities, but not rights, in its irreducibly minimum conception of the individual human being. To be sure, having started with rights, liberalism must and does move to a theory of responsibilities (more typically termed "duties" in accordance with the etymology by which duties are "due to" someone); and having started with responsibilities, eudaimonism must and does move to a theory of rights. Nevertheless the exchange of a rights-primitive conception of the individual for a responsibilities-primitive conception is an alteration in the foundations of political theory affecting every aspect of the superstructure that subsequently arises. Our intent is to examine some of the more telling changes.

One of the changes is that in a responsibilities-primitive framework, rights are furnished with grounds. And today it is necessary to supply rights with grounds.

In the historical beginnings of liberalism (examined in chapter 1) it was distinctly advantageous and probably necessary that the existence of the rights of individuals be regarded as an unquestionable presupposition. This is so because the immediate task was to enfranchise individuals against the sovereignties of church and state, and this cause needed not an argument that provoked counterargument, but a manifesto. But today this "ipsedixitism" (as Bentham termed it)7 has become a liability. In the words of J. M. E. McTaggart, "When a man asserts that he has an immediate certainty of a truth, he doubtless deprives other people of the

right to argue with him. But he also—though this he sometimes forgets—deprives himself of the right to argue with other people."8

"Ipsedixitism" will not suffice today, first because political liberalism is now situated in a world that knows it well, and some sectors of the world judge it wanting, whereas other sectors have serious questions that cannot be blunted by stipulative definitions. Secondly liberalism is now a tradition, which is to say that its basic principles have an extended historical embodiment. This has served to explicate many implications of the principles, not all of which were initially recognized (indeed, we "learn from history" precisely because it is the case that theory never by itself recognizes all of the practical implications of its concepts and principles). The result is that internal to liberalism today are issues about the kinds of rights that persons have that are irresolvable by classical liberalism. They can be resolved by uncovering the grounds of rights, but to hold that rights have grounds is to depart from classical liberalism.

Our contention in this chapter is that the rights of individuals are not weakened but strengthened by deriving them from something prior to them. This is because today the question "Why rights?" must be answered, and the only effective way to answer it is by introducing the grounds of rights, from which they are derived. To be sure, every inquiry necessarily contains presuppositions that are not questioned in that inquiry. The basic presupposition of our present inquiry is that to be a human being is to innately possess potential worth, and (because potential worth inherently lays claim to actualization) to bear the moral responsibility to discover and progressively actualize this worth. Why is this presupposition sounder than that of liberalism? The answer is because today wider agreement can be achieved upon it. In the first place it affords a ground for rights in the proposition, "The rights of individuals must be respected because such respect is a necessary condition for maximizing the realization of potential human value." The rest of the answer consists not in an insupportable claim of "indubitable truth" for the presupposition, nor in deductive demonstration or empirical verification (both of which are inapplicable to rock-bottom presuppositions) but in "pragmatic vindication," which is to say in terms of the consequences of adopting the presupposition and acting upon it. Accordingly in what follows we will seek to show on eudaimonistic foundations: (1) that fights are not inherently adversarial, and therefore social relations are not in essence competitive; (2) that "negative" and "posi-

tive" basic rights can coexist without contradiction; (3) that while "welfare" rights exist, they are circumscribed by responsibilities such that they cannot endlessly proliferate, and they cannot endorse individuals in the disregard of their responsibilities.

But these and other changes are the issue of differing answers of liberalism and eudaimonism to the question of wherein the essential dignity of the human being lies. The liberal answer receives vigorous expression by Joel Feinberg:

Having rights enables us to "stand up like men," to look others in the eye, and to feel in some fundamental way the equal of anyone. To think of oneself as the holder of rights is not to be unduly but properly proud, to have that minimal self-respect that is necessary to be worthy of the love and esteem of others. Indeed, respect for persons . . . may simply be respect for their rights, so that there cannot be the one without the other; and what is called "human dignity" may simply be the recognizable capacity to assert claims. To respect a person then, or to think of him as possessed of human dignity, simply is to think of him as a potential maker of claims. Not all of this can be packed into a definition of "rights"; but these are facts about the possession of rights that argue well their supreme moral importance.9

To test whether "'human dignity' may simply be the recognizable capacity to assert claims" let us first look to the reflexive case: does an individual's sense of his or her own dignity rest in his or her capacity to assert claims? Now it will be illuminating to set this question in developmental perspective. It is typical of small children to issue unending claims—"I want this," "I need that," "You promised me this," "Johnny got that and I want one too." But I think that a child's sense of his or her own dignity comes not from these miscellaneous and disordered pronouncements, but from what is conveyed to the child by parental response. Parental response will be discriminate, honoring some of the child's claims but disregarding others. If the child's sense of dignity lay simply in the claims, parental response would be irrelevant to it. We can if we wish say that that the child's demands and entreaties are merely "claimed claims," some of which are identified as genuine claims by parental response. But such parental response to claims is only a small part of parental caring, and it is in parental respect for the child, conveyed by many forms and expressions of caring, that the child gains the sense of its own dignity. Caring is nurture of good growth, which requires a projection of the child's future. Is it their child's future as a rights-bearer that parents first of all aim at, or is it their child's future as a worthy person? Recognizably it is the latter, for as a future rights-

bearer their child is identical to every other, but what parents attempt to read in their children is signs of individuation—not any child's future but Sarah's, or Timmy's—and worth admits of individuation as (classical liberal) rights-bearing does not.

But if the young child's sense of his or her own dignity comes from parental caring, it is a conferred sense. The same is true of an adult's sense of his or her own dignity that rests in claims understood as "legally recognized," for legal recognition is by the state. To find the inception of an original (in the meaning not of "first" but of "self-originated") sense of self-worth we must look to later childhood or adolescence, and there we find it associated, not with claims, but with responsibilities. It begins with the discovery that "Here is something I can do," and the fact that one is entrusted with the responsibility for doing it affords invaluable confirmation.

Feinberg says that it is as rights-bearers that we have "that minimal self-respect that is necessary to be worthy of the love and esteem of others." I think he is correct in connecting love and esteem to worthiness, which is to say to worth; but he is mistaken to identify worth with tights. To be a rights-bearer says nothing about one's worth—unless rights are so defined as to presuppose worth, and they are not thus defined by liberalism. For eudaimonism love is a response to worth, actual or potential, and rights are instrumentalities for the actualization by individuals of their innate potential worth.

Is dignity merely imputed, or is it recognized? An analogous question is whether honor is merely imputed, or directed to what is honorable. If, as eudaimonism holds, value is objective, then it exists to be recognized, honor is properly directed to what is honorable, trust is properly directed to what is trustworthy, and moral development has objective ends (to become trustworthy, to become honorable, to become just, to become courageous, temperate, patient, resolute, kind). But rights are not objective in this sense; we cannot identify a rights-bearer by what she does, but only by others' conduct toward her that signifies respect of her rights. She may make claims, take liberties, exercise powers, and presume immunities (to employ the categories of rights identified by Wesley Hohfeld),10 but these are perceptible as rights only in the conduct of others in respect to them.

(It does not follow, of course, that whether or not an individual has moral rights is determined by whether or not others respect those rights. Others may fail in their responsibility to respect the rights that a given person has. Our point is simply that rights are not enacted into

the world by their bearers; they must be imputed to their bearers and inferred from the conduct of such others as exhibit respect of someone's rights.)

By contrast individuals perceptibly enact responsibilities. It is true that in order to affirm the basic dignity of all persons we must impute responsibilities to persons unknown to us and also to persons who have not assumed their basic moral self-responsibility (children are the conspicuous case). We do this on the premise of innate potential worth in all persons, which is at the same time responsibility for actualizing this worth. It remains the case that a dignity based in responsibilities is objectively based. It is first recognized and thereafter generalized by imputation; and if it were not recognizable, imputation would be impotent against denial of the dignity it imputes. Because rights are imperceptible, a rights-based dignity is impotent against denial.

We will now outline a eudaimonistic theory of responsibilities and rights and then explore some of its implications especially as they speak to current issues in rights-theory.

The basic moral responsibility of every person is to discover and progressively actualize his or her innate potential worth. From this responsibility basic rights follow, by the logic that "ought" implies "can," as moral entitlements to what the individual needs in order to recognize and undertake his or her basic moral responsibility. Before turning to the form and substance of these rights we must consider the logical principle that "ought" implies "can" in its present application.

It is incoherent to hold persons responsible for doing what is strictly impossible for them to do—to fly, for example, by flapping their arms, or to live forever. But beyond cases of strict impossibility, "can" and "cannot" acquire complicating modalities; for example the distinction must be made between "can try to" and "can succeed"; and "cannot" has psychological and moral modes no less than physical.

For the "ought" of self-actualization to be attributable to individuals, it must be the case that they can discover and progressively actualize their potential worth. But "can" here divides into an unconditional and a conditional sense. The unconditional "can" pertains to the abstract possibility for a person, by the general nature of personhood, to discover his or her innate potentiality and to try to act upon it. It is the possibility in principle of these things. On the other hand the conditional "can" reflects the fact that persons exist in and are affected by situations. These situations arc sets of circumstances which will be conducive to, obstructive of, or neutral with respect to the individual's

exercise of his or her basic moral responsibility. The effect of the abstract "ought" upon these circumstances is to mandate the utilization of conducive circumstances and the removal or overcoming of obstructive circumstances. The effect of this bifurcation of the meaning of "can" and "cannot" is that individuals who are blocked by the circumstantial "cannot" are not relieved of the abstract moral obligation; they must strive against the obstacles. William James and Jose Ortega y Gasset are but two modem moral philosophers who echo the ancient eudaimonistic and Stoic wisdom that moral struggle cultivates the personal resourcefulness and strength of character that in many cases will prevail over initially daunting obstacles. But extreme circumstances can in some instances thwart self-actualization or prevent recognition of the responsibility for it from arising. The judgment to be made in such cases is not that the person is absolved of his or her basic moral responsibility, which is inalienable, but that he or she bears proportionally diminished liability for his or her failure in that responsibility. The next step is to determine the measure of culpability of the society, for some of the necessary conditions of self-actualization by individuals cannot be self-provided but can be socially provided. By the ubiquity of the abstract and unconditional "ought," noted above, it is the first responsibility of any society to provide such conditions for all persons. And by that ubiquity, individuals cannot use obstructive circumstances to deny their own basic moral responsibility ("I cannot, therefore I ought not").11

On this derivation, the basic rights of individuals divide into two classes according to what they are rights to, or substantively, and likewise into two classes formally, that is, according to their derivation. We have referred to the two substantive classes, which are distinguished according to whether what they entitle the individual to can or cannot be self-provided. Rights that can be self-provided are essentially to things and not against other persons, but in Harts phrase they require a "protective perimeter" of negative rights, that is, rights to noninterference. Some fights that cannot be self-provided are "positive" fights, that is, rights to positive performances by others. Formally, some rights are possessed by the individual by virtue of unactualized potentiality—potentiality simply as such—while other fights obtain by virtue of actualized potentiality. Rights of the first kind are inalienable (in the strict sense of "indefeasible," i.e., "can't be lost or taken away") because potentiality is ineradicable. Rights of the second kind are self-alienable because actualized potentiality is subject to lapse.

On the eudaimonistic view as I am presenting it, what one has a right

to is what one needs and can utilize in one's primary moral work of actualizing one's innate potential worth. As thus conceived, rights are in their essential character to things, and only secondarily against other persons. This was recognized in the ancient world, but gave way in modernity to the legalistic conception of rights as "claims against." When rights are defined as "claims against," it will appear that the ethics of Socrates, Plato, and Arisotle are devoid of the conception of rights, whereas in fact rights are included, but under a different definition. And if the concept of "individuality" is thought to be coincident with the concept of the rights of individuals, understood as "claims against," it will be concluded that individuality is a modern notion, whereas Greek eudaimonism defined individuality in terms of responsibilities.

A recent writer whose view corresponds to the ancient conception in this respect is H. J. McCloskey:

My right to life is not a fight against anyone. It is my right and by virtue of it, it is normally permissible for me to sustain my life in the face of obstacles. It does give rise to rights against others in the sense that others have or may come to have duties to refrain from killing me, but it is essentially a fight of mine, not an infinite list of claims, hypothetical and actual, against an infinite number of actual, potential, and as yet nonexistent human beings . . . Similarly, the right of the tennis club member to play on the club courts is a right to play, not a right against some vague group of potential or possible obstructors.12

But McCloskey is an exception to the modern propensity to model ethics upon law. Moral requirements arc framed as rules, moral rules together with law serve the certain purpose of maintaining social order, moral judgments mirror judicial decisions in terms of impartiality and impersonality, and moral rights are conceived on the model of legal rights. The effect upon the conception of moral rights is apparent in Carl Wellman's contention that "the essential presupposition of the language of rights [is] the adversarial context in which its use alone makes sense."13

Wellman offers four reasons for modeling our conception of moral rights upon our conception of legal rights: paradigm cases of rights are more apparent in law than in morality; the content of legal rights is more precisely defined; the practical relevance of legal rights is more apparent; and the literature of jurisprudence lays out alternative theories of legal rights with more precision and detail than the literature of moral philosophy lays out alternative theories of moral rights,14

But if we are traversing a forest, a map of city streets is unhelpful

whatever may be its precision and detail. In the modem setting Wellman's legal modeling of moral rights sits comfortably; but from a eudaimonistic standpoint it is a grand distortion to represent moral rights as inherently adversarial. In a theory that grounds social relations among individuals in respect for their rights, the effect of conceiving of rights as inherently adversarial is to render social relations inherently adversarial. To be sure, cooperation can be engendered on this foundation, but because it necessitates forfeiture, relinquishment, or waiving of (some) rights, and the operative conception of the individual is rights-primitive, it is the cost of cooperation that is emphasized.

By contrast, when rights are understood as deriving from responsibilities they are conceived as inherently nonadversarial because responsibilities are not inherently adversarial. Instead, responsibilities manifest a division of labor which expresses the interdependence of mature human beings thanks to their finitude as individuals. Each is responsible for the actualization of certain values, but each requires for satisfactory living values other than those he or she personally actualizes (as for example in this book I have been utilizing the ideas of a great many other philosophers), for which he or she is dependent upon the work of others. For this reason, as noted in our introduction, the operative conception of the "autonomy" of the individual cannot be total self-sufficiency, but must be compatible with interdependence. We hold "living autonomously" to mean: determining for oneself what one's contributions to others will be, and determining for oneself which values from the self-actualizing lives of others to utilize, and how.

It is the finitude of responsibilities that limits the scope of rights, precluding the ad hoc proliferation that constitutes the crucial problem for rights-theory today. The problem is epitomized in the contrast between Locke and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948. According to Locke all human beings are invested by their nature with the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property, each of which is to be understood negatively (see definition of a "negative right" hereafter). The U. N. Declaration reads in part:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security, in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability., widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.15

Commenting on the proliferation of purported rights, Bertrand de Jouvenel says, "It is a major folly of modem times to fill the individual with ideas of what society owes him rather than of what he owes to society."16 In similar vein H. B. Acton suggests that when fundamental needs (he cites health care, housing, and the education of children) are provided by the state, persons "will come to regard their basic requirements as somebody else's business and to regard amusement as the chief aim of their free choices."17 Again, Iredell Jenkins says,

Under the impetus of a steadily expanding concept of the new human rights, we are mobilizing an immense political and social effort to satisfy the needs of men. But at the same time, under the influence of the traditional doctrine of individual rights, we reject any proposal that would require men to contribute to society to the measure of their ability.... We are placing the state under the legal duty to make good all of the basic needs of men, but we are placing men under no duties of discipline, responsibility, and service to support the effort made in their behalf.18

The thought of each of the philosophers just cited falls squarely within the classical liberal tradition, and in what each says we find resistance to both the proliferation and the changing character of rights, and also frustration at the inadequate handling of responsibilities (duties, obligations) within the classical liberal framework. Liberalism's bulwark against proliferation of rights has traditionally been its distinction between "negative" and "positive" rights, but it is ill-suited to this service, and it curtails obligations, preventing them from expanding to provide for expanding rights. This latter feature today leads liberals who have some sympathy for a limited inclusion of welfare rights (Martin Golding for example) to expand duties by terming them "mandatory rights." But first we will consider the traditional bulwark consisting in the distinction between negative and positive rights.

Traditionally defined, a right is "negative" when the correlative duty it imposes upon others is merely to abstain from interference with the right-holder in the exercise of the right; rights are "positive" when the correlative duties of others are positive performances. In orthodox classical liberal terms, all basic human rights—rights held by human beings simply by virtue of their humanity—are negative rights, and the idea of positive basic rights is precluded by the logic of the case. The paramount values according to liberalism are liberty and equality, and rights protect these values. Liberty, is served by basic rights, and the requisite kind of equality is the possession by all individuals identically of basic

rights. To serve liberty, these rights must be exclusively negative, for to respect negative rights requires no more of others than that they mind their own business. But positive rights intrude coercively upon the liberty of others by mandating particular courses of conduct of them; therefore the very notion of positive basic rights is self-contradictory and introduces a damaging contradition into politics. Nothing here precludes the existence of positive special rights, however. If George promises Arthur a job, Arthur acquires a right to the said positive performance by George. There is no contradiction because the right and the correlative duty are created voluntarily by both parties.

The first problem with this is that the "negative-positive" distinction is difficult to maintain. Advocates of welfare rights can and do define them as serving "the essentially negative goal of preventing or alleviating helplessness."19 Going further, Henry Shue argues that so-called negative rights are actually rights to the establishment and maintenance by government of protective agencies. Such establishment and maintenance by government is positive performance which in turn can be maintained only by positive performances (notably taxpaying) by citizens.20

But the erosion of the bulwark against positive basic rights that marks the historical development of welfare liberalism out of classical liberalism received a powerful push from two other factors, one historical and the other lodged within the self-conception of individuals promulgated by classical liberalism.

Historically, modernity is identified with the growth in influence and power of centralized government. At the time at which Hobbes and Locke wrote it was unthinkable to look to government as the distributive agency for basic benefits, required by all persons, because government lacked the requisite resources. But between that time and ours, in countries such as our own, government has become the principal repository of wealth, the major landholder, the largest employer, and the dominant manager of the conditions of public life. In this situation it becomes reasonable to address welfare-claims to government—provided that what is understood as "welfare" is a distributable commodity.

This proviso was satisfied by the economistic self-conception that was promulgated by classical liberalism, as described in chapter 1. Liberalism's objective of enfranchising individuals against the sovereignties of church and state made sense only on the presupposition of independent initiatives in individuals. The initiative astutely seized upon by realpolitik and classical liberal thinkers as the most universal and reliable was the desire for material gain. To vindicate it they first sought to

discredit higher, and thus rarer and less reliable, human initiatives as hypocritically disguised egoism; they released the desire for material gain from the strict limits placed upon it alike by the medieval church and ancient Greek and Roman moral philosophy; and they transvalued the resulting avarice by invisible hand arguments. The outcome is a conception of the self whose welfare is conceived in terms of material goods. Because material goods are distributable, "welfare" as thus conceived is distributable, and it becomes reasonable to look upon a wealthy and powerful state as a welfare distributor. This generates the impasse described by Jenkins in our earlier citation: "We are placing the state under the legal duty to make good all of the basic needs of men, but we are placing men under no duties of discipline, responsibility, and service to support the effort made in their behalf." The reason we are not exacting the counterbalancing duties and responsibilities is that to do so would be to overtly infringe the liberty that our politico-moral tradition defends. In this tradition all persons are rights-bearers, but bear only such duties as are correlative to the said rights (duties of noninterference), and such obligations as they voluntarily undertake.

An attempt at a corrective within the liberal framework is the concept of a "mandatory right" as distinguished from a "discretionary right," or in Martin Golding's terms, a "welfare-right" as distinguished from an "option-right." An option-right for Golding is "an area of autonomy within which a right-holder is free to decide."21 But what Golding terms a "welfare-right" leaves no option: it must be exercised, and others have no duty not to interfere if it is not exercised. In Feinberg's terms, "If I have a mandatory right to do X then it follows logically that I have—not a right not to do X—but rather a duty to do X."22

Golding's principal example of a mandatory right is the right of all children to education, and Feinberg says that on this point "very likely there is no gainsaying Golding."23 The problem is that in the notion of mandatory rights the concept that has been consecrated to creation and preservation of individual liberty is being used to curtail it.

To those who are disturbed by this paradoxicality, Feinberg proposes a way out: "What is to interpret the right as a claim that each citizen has to live in an educated society. On this construction, each person has a right that all the other persons be educated, and in virtue of the right that the others have that he be educated, he has himself a duty to attend school."24 But surely this is a convoluted way to arrive at a duty. It is analogous to saying that if I want to become a lawyer, then because the lawyers I will eventually associate with have the right to expect that

their colleagues have received training in the law, I have a duty to acquire training in the law. Why should not the duty derive directly from my aim to become a lawyer, by the principle that from one's chosen ends comes the responsibility for utilizing the appropriate means for their achievement? Feinberg's account has the virtue that it does not compromise the liberty-preserving function of rights, as Goldings does, but it avoids this by deriving the duty from a right, which forces it into the indicated convolution.

Compromise of the liberty-preserving function of rights, and gymnastic derivation of performative duties from others' rights, are avoided by preserving the distinction between rights and duties. In this interest we endorse the general definition of a right—encompassing all four kinds of rights distinguished by Hohfeld—as a "respected choice,"25 with legal rights constituting "legally respected choices" and moral rights constituting "morally respected choices." Under this definition a right is bilateral, that is, to do or not to do, and a right also inherently includes the bearer's option to choose not to exercise it on those occasions on which it can be exercised.

It is entirely possible to speak of both a duty and a right to do something without conflating the meanings of "right" and "duty," and without regarding it as a mere case of the same thing seen from different viewpoints. The duty to vote, for example, is also the right to vote, because indispensable to performance of the duty is the "protective perimeter" (in Hart's words) that the right provides. But this understanding requires a source of duties that is other than the source of rights.

Recognizing this enables Henry Shue to avoid the compromises of Golding and Feinberg. "Probably," Shue says, "some rights actually ought to be exercised.... But any duty, if there is one, to take advantage of a right you have would not be a duty correlative to the right, but the quite different kind of duty that flows from a moral ideal of a rich or fulfilled life." I think this is correct. Shue then adds, "Such ideals and their associated duties may well be important, but they simply are not part of a theory of rights."26 This would be accurate if it had been qualified by "... within our political tradition," but is inaccurate without such qualification, for eudaimonism is an alternative political and moral tradition in which ideals and their associated duties are the source of rights.

The sole source of duties that are not generated as correlatives of rights, in classical liberalism, is voluntary agreement. On this understand-

ing an individual can with impunity avoid all duties and responsibilities except the duty to respect the rights of others. Such an individual perhaps does no harm, but also does no good, and a moral viewpoint that is obliged to endorse this as a commendable life is clearly minimalistic. Other persons would be just as well off if this individual had never existed.

In concert with Hart we have defined a right as a protected choice. Any equivocation with the centrality of choice to the concept of rights introduces the risk of compromising the liberty and autonomy of individuals which it is the function of rights both to secure and to preserve. Accordingly we must eliminate the equivocal notion of "mandatory rights" and recognize what they refer to as duties. All rights, then, are liberty-rights. "Claim-rights" protect the choice to lay claim to something or not; "power-rights" protect the choice to exercise a power or not; "immunity-rights" protect the choice to exercise an immunity or not. But the reason choice is to be protected is not to release the individual from all requirements, but to release him or her from external requirements for the purpose of supporting self-imposed requirements. In other words the freedom here supported is not libero arbitrio, but self-determination as against determination of the self by external agencies. It provides the condition under which to recognize the self as first of all a responsibility, namely the responsibility for discovering and progressively actualizing the potential worth that it innately possesses.

This fundamental moral responsibility is not just a responsibility regarding oneself, it is a responsibility in the first instance to oneself. Is this a coherent notion? Kant held that one has a duty to oneself to develop one's talents, and others have held that one has a duty to oneself not to injure oneself. One of the often-noted problems with the concept of a reflexive duty or responsibility is that it requires a duality in the self between that to which the duty or responsibility is owed and that by which it is to be fulfilled. But eudaimonism's conception of the person, we will recall, is as an initial multiplicty—of disordered and conflicting faculties, in Plato's presentation—into which order and integration must be introduced. The essential duality that accommodates the notion of a responsibility to the self is between the ideal self, or daimon, and the actual self. Self-responsibility is the responsibility of the actual self to the ideal self.

But beyond questions of the logical cogency of the notion ora responsibility to oneself, there is presently, I think, compelling practical reason

to return to it. In the preface, in chapter 1, and again just above, we have sought to show that modem moral theory, whose mode we termed "rules morality," makes minimal demands upon individuals. What it demands is what others are entitled to expect of an individual, which by the terms of impartiality and universalizability is what they are entitled to expect of anyone in "relevantly similar circumstances." But the "anyone" here includes persons of little or no moral development, and by the modem understanding of universalizability, what can be expected of them is the limit of what can be expected of others. The effect of social conditioning in this moral minimalism is to produce persons who expect of themselves nothing beyond minimal moral performance.

Persons who aspire to higher moral thought and conduct in a morally minimalistic setting cannot be supposed to be responding to others' expectations of them, and I think we make sense of their conduct best by understanding it as their responses to self-originated expectations of themselves. And if the notion of expecting something of oneself is cogent and useful, I see no reason that the same cannot be true of "holding oneself responsible," and of having "duties to oneself." Harry Frankfurt's analysis of "second order" desires is relevant here.27 What he terms a second-order desire is a desire to desire, as for example in the case of a person who does not have the desire to listen to classical music, but has the desire to have that desire. Thus understood, it will be evident that second-order desires play a central part in character development. The person one seeks to become is the bearer of qualifies, including desires, that one presently lacks, and the desire to become that person is the desire to learn to act, think, feel, and desire as that envisaged person does. If this character development is a moral responsibility, then it makes sense to say that one recognizes a duty to oneself to learn to act, think, feel, and desire as does the person one aspires to become.

But because the self is inherently social it cannot be conceived as exclusive of other selves, or "atomically," and a duty to the self can be at the same time a duty to others. A good way to recognize what eudaimonism holds to be the basic moral responsibility of the individual as a duty to others is in terms of culture as tradition. In its aspect as tradition, culture is cumulative knowledge and practices bequeathed to each new generation by its predecessors. It means that every human being begins life as a recipient and is responsible in subsequent, productive stages of life for recognizing and repaying this debt. As a debt to prior generations it cannot be repaid to them, but is a responsibility to con-

serve and enrich the culture that the next generations will receive. However, the effect of recognizing this responsibility as also a responsibility of the individual to him- or herself is to ascribe to each individual the responsibility for determining in what coinage his or her debt is to be repaid. In a self-fulfilling life, it will be repaid by actualization of the particular values for which the individual is innately responsible.

Derivation of rights from responsibilities will generate both "positive" and "negative" rights. This is because, while "welfare" cannot be distributed, some of its necessary conditions can be, and among them are some that a good society will distribute because they cannot be self-supplied by individuals. In this latter category some conditions are negative, for example, protection of individuals against unwarranted intrusions by other persons, groups, or institutions, protection against fraud, protection of society against invasion. But some are positive, including guaranteed subsistence, provision of appropriate education for children, facilitation for adolescents of "freedom and variety of situations" as discussed in chapter 3, provision of a public information service as will be proposed in chapter 6, and some part in providing good organizational management as such management will be defined in chapter 7.

In eudaimonistic perspective, "positive" rights are not entitlements to "welfare" but to conditions for the exercise of responsibilities by individuals. This is because “welfare" is at bottom the well-being of persons, which consists in their own developed moral character, the principal agency of which is individuals themselves. In this light it is seriously misleading to use the term "welfare" to refer to public programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Aid to Dependent Children, and unemployment compensation.

While derivation of rights from responsibilities generates both positive and negative rights, it curbs the ad hoc proliferation of purported rights by the inherent limits of responsibilities. In accord with many rights-theorists today let us regard the declaration of a fight as the laying of a claim, and the establishment of a right as the establishment of a "justified" or a "valid" claim. The point to be noticed is that the activity of claiming has no inherent limits; an individual may, without doing violence to the meaning of "claiming," lay claim to anything and everything at once. To refer claims to desires, as for example Hobbes does by inferring the right to self-preservation and felicity from the instinctive desire for these, does not alter this picture, for like claims, desires are without intrinsic limit. Accordingly a theory that is rights-primitive has but two

recourses in order to restrict rights by distinguishing what are genuinely such from what are falsely declared to be such: it can try to do so by definition, as in the contention that basic rights are exclusively negative; or it can introduce criteria from another source. The first recourse is vulnerable (as we have seen) to the charge of stipulative definition, whereas the second cannot avoid an ad hoc appearance.

By contrast rights that derive from responsibilities are restricted by the inherent finitude of responsibilities. The exercise of a productive responsibility (as self-actualization is) is a concrete course of conduct by a particular individual which, during the time required, precludes to the individual alternative courses of conduct. To be sure, an individual can undertake alternative courses of conduct successively; but when the responsibility of the individual is to live a determinate life, it precludes to him or her the living of alternative lives. The principle once again is Spinoza's omnis determinatio est negatio. And if rights are entitlements by the individual to what he or she needs and can utilize in living the life that he or she is responsible for living, then what we may call the "constraint of finitude" is an inherent limitation upon his or her rights.

We intuitively recognize the constraint of finitude in respect to responsibilities, for although a person may desire all things for himself, no one is ready to accept more than a very limited number of productive responsibilities. (There is no corresponding limit on responsibilities of abstention, for to do any one thing is at the same time to abstain from doing an infinitude of other things. Likewise we can simultaneously fulfill our duties of noninterference to a limitless number of other persons simply by minding our own business.)

Moreover the individual who possesses self-knowledge and lives by it manifests justice, first by not laying claim to goods that he or she cannot utilize, and second by actively willing such goods into the hands of those who can untilize them toward self-actualization. What is expressed in both cases is not "selflessness," but the proportionality of a serf-responsible self that is situated in relations of interdependence with other selves that are, or ought to be, self-responsible. An individual who possesses self-knowledge and lives by its direction recognizes goods to which he or she is not entitled as distractions from his or her proper course of life—"loud and noisy things," in Nietzsche's expression, "emphatic trifles" in Emerson's. And to will to others their true utilities is at the same time the concrete expression of respect for them as ends in themselves and recognition that we stand to gain from the worthy

living of others. Eudaimonistic individualists from Socrates to Thoreau have sought to remind us that our needs of others—whether of parents, teachers, plumbers, carpenters, doctors, lovers, or friends—are best served when those others are self-identified with what they do and experience it as self-fulfilling.

By eudaimonism's responsibilities-primitive conception of persons, the fundamental moral responsibility of each individual is for moral self-development, and the derivative basic rights are to subsistence, protection, and enablement.

We will define subsistence as adequate food, shelter, clothing, and basic health care. The right to subsistence derives from the potential worth of every person and is inalienable by virtue of the inalienability of this innate potentiality. In earlier citations from Jouvenel, Acton, and Jenkins we can read the objection that a right to subsistence confirms a recipiency orientation within which persons can with impunity live on the basis of others' efforts. But in a responsibilities-based understanding, subsistence is the first condition of the exercise of responsibility and carries the expectation of such exercise. A fair expression of this difference is the recent transformation in some states of "welfare" to "workfare," but the latter must be sensitive to the distinction between bare productivity and self-fulfilling productivity. If it is the latter that constitutes the well-being of persons that society exists to promote, then workfare must include opportunity for exploration and choice among a wide range of types of work, and this mandates national administration.

To summarize: the right to subsistence is the license to live unproductively if the conceptual framework within which it is introduced is rights-primitive; however, the right to subsistence will serve to generalize productive living when the setting within which it appears is responsibilities-primitive.

Rights to protection are the "protective perimeter" that exercise of responsibilities requires. Central here are the Lockean rights to life, liberty, and property, but responsibilities-primitivism significantly alters their meaning.

The liberty in question becomes so-called "positive" freedom, that is, "freedom for..." and not merely the negative "freedom from..." As effective freedom and not merely formal freedom it includes considerations of enablement, starting with the subsistence that we have just addressed. The very idea of positive freedom has been famously held to be the seed of despotism by Isaiah Berlin in his "Two Concepts of

Liberty."28 The charge is apt in reference to the Absolute Idealisms, such as of Hegel and Bradley, that Berlin has in mind and also in reference to a "closed teleology" type of eudaimonism such as was Aristotle's on the "dominant end" interpretation of his thought.29 What Absolute Idealism and "closed" eudaimonism have in common is that each claims a priori knowledge of the good of all human beings, defines freedom as pursuit of this good, and takes measures to discourage other courses of conduct and other conceptions of the good. But the "open" eudaimonism that we are setting forth in this book is immune to Berlin's charge, for the ideal it promotes is the self-identification of individuals according to their chosen ends. Self-identification had conditions, such as the "freedom, and variety, of situations" we considered in chapter 3, that only an open society can provide.

According to Locke, the right to property is an ownership right, but in eudaimonistic terms it is a use right. The primary difference is that the latter is inherently limited whereas the former is not. From the standpoint of ownership there is nothing to be said against such a distribution of wealth as exists in the United States today, where the top fifth of families owns almost eighty percent, while the bottom fifth owns two-tenths of a percent.30 But so extreme a disparity will be condemned by a eudaimonistic use criterion.

In Lockean terms, ownership begins with the self and extends to material goods through the labor that the self "mixes" with them. The effect of this is that the identity of the self is "mixed" with its material possessions. But in the absence of a self-knowledge that is independent of its material possessions, this is an inducement to identify oneself as one's material possessions. In this case moral growth will be discounted in favor of the endless accumulation of material possessions.

Finally, in Lockean terms "ownership" is defined exclusively because it is the extension of a self that is conceived atomically, as "a private dominion exclusive of the rest of mankind."31 This entails exclusivity in regard to the interests of each person, and the division of experience into "public" and "private" sectors. The private sector of experience serves to protect those interests of each person in which, by the atomic conception of personhood, other persons have no legitimate interest. But to preclude legitimate interests of others in the essential personhood of each is, as communitarian critics of classical liberalism charge, to preclude to persons the community that meaningful living requires. On the other hand communitarians typically argue for the legitimate interest of each person in the welfare of other persons by

affirming the priority of shared interests over distinctive individual interests and calling for the sacrifice of the latter to the "common good."

For eudaimonism the common good is no more and no less than the particular goods of individuals in complementary interrelationship. The requirement for complementary interrelationship is implicit in the fact that the good that is to be actualized, conserved, and defended—the good that represents the individual's achieved identity—is an objective good, that is, it is of value to others no less than to the individual who actualizes it. Because this is so, no life can be said to be fulfilled whose worth is not recognized and utilized by (some) other persons in their own self-actualizing enterprises. Correspondingly every well-lived life must utilize values produced by (some) other well-lived lives. And this is to say that within a society, every person has a legitimate interest in the essential personhood of every other. (The move here from "some others" to "every other" is legitimated by the fact that those upon whom you or I rely have need of values produced by others, who have need of values produced by others.) This is the foundation of a form of community that in chapter 6 we will term "community of true individuals" and consider in more detail.

In this form of community individual self-determination, self-direction, and self-fulfillment are not sacrificed to the "common good" but nurtured as the foundation of the common good. Is the very notion of "privacy" abolished by the recognition that the inmost personhood of every individual is of legitimate interest to other persons? Not when the essence of personhood is understood as the responsibility for self-actualization by each individual, on his or her autonomous initiative. For this dictates that others' interest in each must begin with respect for the autonomy of each. In chapter 4 we termed the disposition to this respect the virtue of deference. Our expectations of others must defer to their self-expectations.

Eudaimonism endorses a right to privacy, but not on the grounds that experience itself contains a domain of privacy. The classical claim that experience inherently includes a private domain is advanced by Mill in the first chapter of On Liberty. The effect of this within classical liberalism is to render the individual's use of his or her privacy noncriteriological. By the definition of the domain the rights of others are not violated by the individual's private conduct; and because other obligations are voluntarily undertaken, an individual who chooses to accept none, has none, and freedom in the private domain becomes libero arbitrio. To be sure, on his eudaimonistic side (as expressed in

chapter 3 of On Liberty, in his qualitative distinction among pleasures, and in his conception of the good state in Considerations on Representative Government ), Mill sought to rectify, this. But in so-doing he introduced contradictions into his thought, because the eudaimonistic and the classical liberal conceptions of individuality and moral obligation are not commensurable.

Robert Nozick refers to privacy as "moral space,"32 but he does not mean space in which moral work is to be done. His concern is with the question of authority, which in his classical liberal view must begin with the self-authority of individuals, who may then transfer some of their self-authority to such institutions as protective agencies and the state. As a form of individualism, eudaimonism agrees that primacy of authority is borne by individuals and that the state must respect this self-authority. But eudaimonism differs significantly from classical liberalism in what kind of state best exhibits this respect (our theme in chapter 7). And by eudaimonism's responsibilities-primitivism, rights serve responsibilities, and the privacy that is protected by right is not the domain of libero arbitrio —it is the domain of freedom for self-determination as distingnished from the determination of the self by agencies external to it.

The right to privacy creates a domain of privacy, it does not validate a domain that is inherent in experience. To see this, consider what is the most promising candidate for such a domain. This candidate is subjectivity, understood as the content of the self—feelings, thoughts, perceptions, and so forth—to which the individual alone has immediate access, while the access of other persons depends upon the mediation that is afforded by various forms of expression. But subjectivity, is not an inherent domain of privacy, because it is not a "domain"; instead it is part of a process, namely the process of objectivization by which persons live their lives into the world. In Emerson's words, "... for always the inmost in due time becomes the outmost. …,,33 Because living must be into the world, subjectivity, from the beginning contains implicitly within it its objective issue from which it cannot be divorced. The poem that begins with an image or a line in one's head is already aimed at expression.

In this light privacy is a right of individuals because it is a necessary condition of self-discovery and self-actualization. To hear one's own inner voice requires the opportunity of chosen occasions on which the vociferous world is stilled. And the reason that the autonomy of individuals must be protected is that in the beginning it is tentative and vulnerable, wholly unequal to the buffeting that awaits its expression in

the world. This is a developmental consideration. It is true that individuals long disciplined in self-directed living will have acquired the strength of character by which to make their way undeterred. Nevertheless the right to privacy continues to serve, for self-actualization is perpetual origination; if it has built firm dispositions behind, yet at its forward extremity it is, in Abraham Maslow's good term, a tender "growth-tip."34 In a word, the right to privacy serves the process of incubation. When Isaac Newton was asked how he arrived at his theory of the mechanical laws of the universe, he replied, " Nocte dieque incubando "—by incubating them night and day. To live originally, out of oneself, is to be perpetually aware that some of one's fresh thoughts, feelings, and experimental traits of character are not yet ready to see the light of day. The right to privacy enables individuals themselves to control the process by which "the inmost in due time becomes the outmost"; it shelters incubation.

The right to personal property is necessary to individual autonomy, both as protection and as enablement. It is the former function that receives emphasis in the words of the elder William Pitt: "The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England may not enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!"35

A just and temperate person seeks to possess what he or she is entitled to, neither less nor more. Eudaimonistically conceived, what each person essentially is is a work of self-actualization for which he or she is responsible. Accordingly each person holds natural entitlement to goods he or she needs and can utilize in the exercise of this responsibility. As noted earlier, some of these entitlements obtain merely by virtue of the individual's potential worth, and because potential worth is inalienable, so likewise these rights are inalienable. The right to subsistence is an inalienable right, and to correlate it with the growth-responsibility of individuals, the subsistence cannot be "bare," but must include a growth-increment. For another example, imprisoned criminals regardless of their crimes are entitled to be treated with respect in acknowledgment of their potential worth, and in almost all cases the operational meaning of respect" must include opportunity for rehabilitation. The demand of "rioting prisoners at Attica, Graterford, and other penitentiaries to be "treated like human beings, not like animals" is valid.

Earlier in this chapter we considered the case of persons whose

socioeconomic conditions obstructed their recognition and fulfillment of the moral responsibility of self-actualization. Here we will briefly address the question of how eudaimonism's "rights from responsibilities" doctrine affects persons who are from birth or injury severely handicapped, either mentally or physically, or both.

In the great majority of such cases, the innate potentiality to manifest moral worth remains present, though it may be in varying measure restricted. For example in the case of feeble-mindedness, as was noted in the introduction there are many virtues—for example, lovingness, fidelity, compassion, honesty—that do not depend upon even average intelligence. Persons who possess the potentialities for such virtues are entitled to the conditions of their manifestation and to social supply of such of the conditions as they cannot self-supply. The judgment that only "superior" or "normal" persons can manifest virtues is parochial. A listing of historically recognized human virtues (cardinal and distributed) would exceed a hundred,36 and persons in whom handicaps preclude manifestation of some of them will be capable of manifesting others. The first order of business here is the educational work of correcting the prevailing narrow recognition of but a few virtues—a parochialism that is one of the consequences of modem moral minimalism.

In eudaimonistic conception a being with no moral potentialities whatever is not human. Sadly this describes some entities that might have been human, for example infants born without a brain, and some entities that once were human, for example comatose accident victims in whom all or most brain-function has been destroyed. Such creatures have no rights; but morality is not limited to respect of rights. Are moral responsibilities toward them entailed in particular cases by worthy individuality? By the eudaimonistic definition of a good society? I find compelling an argument by Jane English for what she calls the "coherence of attitudes." She contends that

our psychological constitution makes it the case that for our ethical theory, to work, it must prohibit certain treatment of non-persons which are significantly person-like. If our moral rules allowed people to treat some person-like nonpersons in ways we do not want people to be treated, this would undermine the system of sympathies and attitudes that makes the ethical system work.37

Returning to ordinary cases: on a responsibilities base, no one is entitled to more of a good than he or she can utilize, and no one is entitled to incommensurate goods, that is, goods whose utilization serves a course of life alternative to that of the person in question.

Persons directly responsible for others who require to be cared for—their children, their infirm or aged relatives—have correspondingly increased entitlements. "Caring for one's children" is to be understood as preparing them for self-responsible, self-directed living and ceases to entail provision of material goods when this has been achieved. The desire of parents to secure their grown children against misfortune by means of inheritance must not be entirely thwarted, but a ceiling on inheritance is required as a measure toward rectification of the gross inequity in present distribution of wealth (see figures cited earlier). I know of no studies of the effect of large inheritance upon the recipients in terms of their character-development, but my guess is that in the aggregate, harm approaches benefit at $100,000 and outweighs it at $500,000. What must be considered is not just the effect upon the individual of inheriting substantial wealth at, say, the age of forty, but the effect upon him or her of knowing of the prospective inheritance from perhaps the age of twenty.

The admonition that "our possessions possess us" (Stoics, Nietzsche, Thoreau) is particularly apt in reference to incommensurate goods. To possess such goods is to live with a perpetual distraction from one's true course of life. If one succumbs to the distraction, one's actualization of one's own innate potential worth is compromised. If one does not succumb, one wastes the value of the potential good. How many of the people who own Porsche or Ferrari automobiles are capable of or situated to utilize the potentialities of these machines?

Or consider if you will—umbrellas. For years I carried, with perfect peace of mind, a twelve-dollar model purchased at a local department store. Then two years ago I was irresistibly attracted to one at Harrod's in London that was made from a Yorkshire walking stick and cost the equivalent of seventy-five dollars. From that point on I was deathly afraid of losing my umbrella; and when rain was accompanied by wind I carried it furled for fear it would be blown inside-out. Two months ago, to my blessed relief, I contrived to lose it for good.

For a last example: the Association of University Women holds an annual used book sale in my town. It is eagerly awaited and thronged equally by students from my university and the many townspeople for whom reading is an important activity. The first time I went to hunt treasures, I noticed a man who was pushing a train of shopping carts into which he was carelessly scooping whole shelves of books. When I encountered him again the next year, behaving as before, I inquired of one of the attending AUW women if she happened to know who he

was and what he was doing. "Yes," she replied. "He is a building contractor who puts up residences for people. The houses contain what he is pleased to call 'the library,' and he takes pride in the fact that he saves floor space by slicing the spines from the books he buys and gluing the spines to the walls. He throws the pages of the books away." I clutched tightly the out-of-print two-volume Letters of Joseph Conrad I had found, and reflected on the persons who were denied their comparable joys by the bandsaw bandit.

It is important to notice that establishment of an individual's entitlement to a good does not address the question of how the entitlement is to be met. By the priority that eudaimonism ascribes to individual autonomy, individuals are themselves responsible for self-supplying such of their utilities as can be so supplied without serious compromise of their own self-actualization. The reason for the qualification is that for any person the bare "can" is much broader than the applicable "ought." Literally a musician, say, can (learn to) grow her own food, build her own house, repair her own car, and tailor her own clothes. But if she is responsible for every such "can," she will make little or no music. It may be the case that one or another of such "cans" is a useful complement, in her case, to her music-making, and is thereby included within her "ought"; but others will conflict and should be avoided in the interest of her integrity. It is normally to be expected that her music-making will provide her with monetary income by which to contract for the utilities she requires, and in this case we regard the said utilities as self-provided at a one-step remove. But no one in the early stages of life is capable of such self-provision, and in subsequent stages some conditions of worthy living by individuals are by their nature insusceptible of self-provision. Justice requires provision of non-self-suppliable necessary conditions by the appropriate social institution, that is, by family, community, workplace, or state.

By its provision of non-self-suppliable utilities to individuals, society expresses its legitimate interest in the deepest interests of individuals. There is no sphere of privacy from which legitimate social interest is locked out. But because the social value of individual lives is to be realized on the autonomous initiative of individuals, autonomy requires to be protected by a right of privacy as we have previously indicated, and this right creates a sphere of privacy.

Accordingly the property tight we are here defending is better termed the right to personal property than the right to private property. This is because within the classical liberal tradition "private" bears the

connotation of exclusivity that is associated with atomic individuality. In Locke's terms, private property is for the "benefit and sole advantage of the proprietor."38 But the notion that true benefit to the individual can be his or her benefit exclusively is a deep-seated modem misconception, and virulently corrosive of social and personal life. Its prevalence reflects the modem moral minimalism that disregards (or judges "supererogatory") the intermediate and higher stages of moral development where, as Plato and Aristotle insisted, the goods sought and realized by individuals are objective, that is, good not for the self exclusively, but likewise for whoever is capable of recognizing and appreciating them as what they are.

And what of the ground-level material goods of survival? It is of course true that because one consumes the food one eats, it cannot be shared. Nevertheless it does not serve one's own good exclusively, for its status is that of a utility in the enterprise of attaining to an objectively worthy life. To recognize it as such requires that our rights-primitive conception of human beings be exchanged for eudaimonism's responsibilities-primitive conception.