Integrative Questions: 1. What is Nowheresville? Explain the concept of personal desert. What are claim-rights? Review Questions: 1. Describe Nowheresville. How is this world different from our world? Why does Feinberg think they are morally important? Claim rights are conceptual linkage between personal rights and claiming. Discussion Questions: 1. Does Feinberg make a convincing case for the importance of rights?
Why or why not? Yes, because Feinberg explained the importance of rights through describing Nowheresville. Can you give a noncircular definition of claiming-right? Claiming Right is something that describes that right is connected with claim. Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading A creditor has the right of being paid back his money while the beggar has no right to receive any money from me.
In the first case the duty of the debtor entails the right of the creditor while in the second case my duty to give some money to the beggar does not entail any rights on his side. We have clarified the term duty but we will leave the definition of a right for now and will come back to it later on in our analysis mainly because of its complexity.
C To have a right makes for self-respect and respect for others. I decided to make each premise a section so as to thoroughly analyze the entire paper of Feinberg without omitting any important aspect. The main difference with our world is that the Nowheresville people do not have rights nor do they know the concept of a right.
As Feinberg says, this world might initially seem to us too cruel a place to live. And this is where he starts adding several characteristics to Nowheresville in order to bring it as close as possible to our world but without ever allowing for the existence of rights. In this way he tries to make us use our intuition and see that eventually the absence of rights comes hand in hand with the absence of respect and self-respect.
Initially Feinberg allows for various moral virtues, such as compassion and benevolence, to enter the picture. The people of Nowheresville are not cruel, bloodthirsty villains. So far so good. Yet we can easily resolve this if we interpret the word duty not according to its etymological origins but in the way it is used in everyday speech. Nowheresville law can have duties of the sort imposed by positive law.
That way people will owe obedience 5 Ibid. Thus we do not get individual right holders but persons that owe obedience to a higher authority. The other kind of duties that we can allow is extra-legal duties. The example of the beggar that we used in the previous section can serve as well in this case. I feel obliged to give him some money, and thus I have a duty to do so, not because he has a right to these money but because I have a personal moral code that obliges me to do so.
The next step that Feinberg takes is to introduce into Nowheresville the practices of personal desert and sovereign monopoly of rights. He is very careful to demonstrate how the introduction of these two new concepts does not allow for the existence of individual right holders. To deserve something is not the same with having a right on something.
As we will see later on rights enable their holders to make claims. Contrary to a right, desert does not allow for the act of claiming. If a stranger comes every day at my house and cleans my garden he might well deserve a kind of compensation.
A meal or some money would probably be deserved for his daily efforts of keeping the garden clean. Yet by no means is he entitled to the meal or the money.
It was his idea to clean the garden and there was no kind of agreement between him and myself either an oral one or a written one such as a contract. Consequently I am not bound by any means to compensate him for his trouble even though most of us would consider it unfair if I would not do so. In case I would give him the compensation I would not do so because I would have to but entirely out of gratitude for his voluntary services.
Consequently, he has no right over the compensation and thus he cannot claim it. Desert might be in place but rights are not. Those people had no rights against the higher authority of their monarch. But this duty was owed not to the subjects directly, but to God, just as we might have a duty to a person to treat his property well, but of course no duty to the property itself but only to its owner.
Leviathan subjects could enter into bilateral relationships such as contracts and marriages. This is because the relationships between them were governed by duties that entailed rights, something that was not the case with the relationships between them and their monarch.
The people of Nowheresville on the other hand, do not have rights even in the relationships that establish among them. In their case they might have duties towards one another but the correlative rights that are entailed in such duties are owned by a higher authority. Thus if party A does not honor the duties that has towards party B, it does not wrong party B but instead the higher authority since this is the one that holds the correlated right of the breached duty. The following illustration should make things even clearer.
As mentioned in the very beginning of the previous paragraph, at least three parties are needed in order to establish any kind of moral or legal relationship. Two of these parties are those that are interested in establishing the relationship between them. An example could be a debtor and a creditor that enter into the legal relation of signing a contract.
An example of the third party, namely the higher authority, could be a monarch. Since the debtor and the creditor have signed a loan the legal relationship , the debtor has a 8 Ibid. In the case that the debtor does not pay back the loan he does not honor his duty towards the creditor. The rights are held exclusively by the higher authority which in our example is a monarch.
Consequently only the monarch the third party, the higher authority is able to demand from the debtor payment of the loan. What Feinberg manages to do once more with his idea of sovereign right- monopoly is to introduce certain duties into the imaginary world of Nowheresville without at the same time smuggling in along with them correlative rights. In his paper, Feinberg demonstrates how closely related is the concept of a right with the concept of a claim.
Let us take a closer look at the terminology that he uses. Here Feinberg tries to distinguish claim-rights from other kinds of legal terminology such as liberties, immunities and powers. Most importantly the above definition implies that the second part of the correlativity principle does indeed hold, namely that rights entail duties.
But we should keep in mind that this definition primarily concerns claim-rights. The example of Nowehresville comes in now very handy in seeking out and finding the connection between these two concepts. What is it that Nowheresvillians lack despite the various additions that we allowed for when we compare them with ourselves?
It is the ability to engage in the activity of claiming. These people not only do they have no rights but they do not even know what a right is. Yet we always took care that by no means do we smuggle in rights as well. This was primarily facilitated by severing the link of correlativity between rights and duties. We achieved this either by interpreting the word duty in a specific way as used in everyday speech or by using special mechanisms such as the sovereign monopoly of rights.
The end result is that people of Nowheresville never derive their duties from the fact that they hold rights and thus performance of their duties cannot be demanded by others through the act of claiming with the sovereign being possibly the only exception. But of what kind? According to him a right is a valid claim. Thus, his approach is to characterize not necessarily rights themselves, nor duties, nor claims, but instead he gives a statement of the relationship of rights to claims and also morality.
Thus one property cannot exist without the other necessarily existing. To summarize one might say that Feinberg has attempted to give an account of the interrelated nature of rights, duties, and their moral justification.
A moral imperative directed at someone e. As I said earlier, I will not in this piece be criticizing what Feinberg appears to be saying if my analysis is correct , therefore I will avoid going into what I believe are the problematic areas of his article.
Instead I will simply comment that it seems as though a complete theory or a reasonable one, we might say of morality and moral justification seem necessary to properly understand when a person has a duty to another, as this understanding is appropriate so that we are not arbitrarily assigning rights and duties. Posted by Theopnuestos at PM.
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