Moral Philosophy Reading Group

This week will be a work-in-progress session, discussing a draft paper by our very own Bradley Hillier-Smith, on ‘Rights, Duties and Inviolability’.

Here is the abstract: Rights entail corresponding negative duties not to violate those rights. On this, all rights-theorists agree. Yet there is disagreement on whether rights also entail positive duties to protect and assist the right-holder if and when their rights are threatened. While the Interest Justification of Rights supports such positive duties (Raz 1986), defenders of the Inviolable Moral Status Justification of Rights reject them (Nozick 1974; Nagel 2007; Kamm 2008). On this latter view, all persons have an inviolable moral status that gives rise to particularly robust rights and stringent negative duties, but not additional positive duties, which are not required to reflect persons’ inviolable moral status. This paper seeks to demonstrate that positive duties to protect and assist right-holders against rights-violations are in fact grounded by the very same justification invoked to ground the stringent rights and negative duties in the first instance: the inviolable moral status of persons.

Location: Edgecliffe G03 and Teams

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