Joel Feinberg's Nature and Value of Human Rights summarized

One of the recent readings in my Philosophy of Human Rights class has been a piece written by Joel Feinberg, formerly at the University of Arizona as he passed away not long ago, entitled "The Nature and Value of Human Rights" (the reader it is from is The Philosophy of Human Rights, edited by Patrick Hayden, published in 2001). In the space provided below I will limit myself to summarizing and articulating Feinberg’s position, as any criticisms I have will be forthcoming and related to a future paper due in the class.

To begin, I will do so where Feinberg begins, and that is with a thought experiment. He begins his article by conceiving of a make-believe world called “Nowheresville.” “Nowheresville [is a] world very much like our own, except that no one, or hardly any one (the qualification is not important), has rights,” (emphasis original, pp. 174 of Hayden text). We are asked to imagine this place is in fact quite morally superfluous, that is, acts of generosity are in abundance and empathy is practically given away at the corner store. Hence, normal social interactions within Nowheresville are at an elevated level of eloquence, courtesy, and chivalry in both public and private discourse.

Beginning here, Feinberg then takes us on a journey of examining what the consequences would be if slight changes were made to the nature of Nowheresville. He first says, “Let us…introduce duties into Nowheresville, but only in the sense of actions that are, or believed to be, morally mandatory, but not in the older sense of actions that are due others and can be claimed by others as their right,” (pp. 176). The distinction is that we now have the kinds of “duties” that are “required” by the law, “under pain of penalty,” but that we do not have the kind of duties to others that entail their rights. By “duties” is meant the idea of something due to someone, and thus paying our dues becomes paying that which we owe others and they can make a claim to. Keep in mind that this does not have to be any kind of monetary debt, but something that naturally arises either from (a) the inherent worth of an individual such that the realization of his needs are someone’s debt, or (b) the establishing of a contract which binds two or more people together as to what each owes the other, given the obtaining of certain circumstances.

Hence, because Nowheresville lacks such duties, when someone else is at fault for hurting us, such as breaking our window by playing baseball in our backyard, we can complain and say that they were wrong and should fix our window, but because we have no right and they no duty, we have no moral justification for making the claim that it is their duty. In fact, the thought does not even cross our mind – according to Feinberg – to make such a claim because the other person has no moral duty to us, therefore they have no responsibility to fix the window – and we certainly have no right to claim that they do. Surely we can state a moral ought, but this does not equal a right or the assertion of a duty – according to Feinberg.

Feinberg then goes on to make other changes to Nowheresville that I will not explore. The important conclusion yielded from his thought experiment – or what he is claiming as important – is that no matter what else Nowheresville has, if it does not have the idea of rights then something “morally important” is missing. So what does Feinberg have to say about the nature of rights that is so morally significant? On this matter his statements are – I believe – somewhat imprecise, mainly because he thinks that a philosophically rigorous definition of rights is impossible, and as such he is likely entirely correct. 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. First, I should begin by giving a bit more insight into the nature of rights from Feinberg’s perspective with this quote: “Even if there are conceivable circumstances in which one would admit rights diffidently, there is no doubt that their characteristic use and that for which they are distinctively well suited, is to be claimed, demanded, affirmed, and insisted upon…Having rights, of course, makes claiming possible; but it is claiming that gives rights their special moral significance.” This quote comes after he has attempted to sort out the difficulty in distinguishing the difference between a right and a claim, because the existence of one seems to first necessitate the other and the effect is a very circular juggling of terms. As Feinberg sees it, rights and claims cannot exist separately, almost like relational properties (Two examples of relational properties are “taller than” and “shorter than.” If Tree A has the property of being “taller than” Tree B, then we necessarily infer that Tree B is “shorter than” Tree A. Thus one property cannot exist without the other necessarily existing.”). He thinks that to make sense of one you must have the other, like to understand “up” you must have “down,” but he notes that claims and rights are distinct, just like up and down are distinct (though one requires the other).

All this having been said, here is part of Feinberg’s concluding paragraph: “To have a right is to have a claim against someone whose recognition as valid is called for by some set of governing rules or moral principles.” (text, pp. 185). In this sentence we see as close as Feinberg comes to giving a definition of a right, though by shorthand he says that a right is a “valid claim” (c.f. text pp. 182-183).

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.g. “you ought to fix my window because you broke it”) that does not inherently carry with it a morally justified (meaning, that I can appeal to morality to justify it) duty, is not the assertion of a “right” in Feinberg’s sense. Rather, a duty that is to someone, and which is morally justified, naturally creates a “right” for that person to that which the duty specifies (i.e. mowing the law, paying your taxes, etc.)

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. Hence, I believe that much work must be done before Feinberg’s case can be made, and the purpose of this article by itself was not to facilitate this broad of a point.