I think there are a lot of interesting things in the posts below but two I want to draw particular attention to. I enjoyed Mike's post a lot because it gets to the heart of a fundamental question in politics: Where ought (or should) morality be injected into law? One option, of course, is the legislature. All students in Pols001 know the basic problems of legislation--legislators are responsive to the populous. To give all the power of dictating morality to the majority would be ill advised--I, at least, am not compelled that what the public believes to be moral always is moral.

But then, as Mike notes, you have judges. In theory, these judges check poor legal (and, therefore, moral) maneuvers by congress. As Wellman discusses at the end of chapter 3, sometimes legal decisions/laws do something odd--they turn around and create new moral rights. These aren't brand new ideas, of course, but new ways of thinking about human rights. Often times, these are auxilliary rights. Judges, because of their unique place in society, have the ability to see the way our current legal and moral discourse fails to capture the ways in which individuals should be protected. Then again, they are also human, and many of them have overruled laws which probably accurately captured morality. In sum, just as legislators and judges share a responsibility to guard the constitution/represent the will of the people, they also share an obligation to keep an eye on morality.

The second post I think is important is Ryan's. First off, I don't think Native Americans generally like being referred to as "red." I also think that your argument mischaracterizes the arguments Wellman outlines. In sum, most of them claim that discrimination does still occur today. It is not merely a discussion of one's grandparents being discriminated against. The conditions 100 years ago created unequal access to education, housing, health care, etc. today. The complaint outlined in the book is whether or not this creates a new ability to "discriminate" in order to rectify injustice that occurs now.

This leads to my primary concern with the affirmative action argument as outlined by Wellman. One piece seems to be missing. I can buy the claim that Bakke might not have ever actively discriminated against anyone. Is he not, however, advantaged in virtue of his status as a white male? Is there an argument to be made that his position in society is at least partially determined by his being white? If we agree that African-Americans are disadvantage in virtue of their skin color (as the argument Wellman outlines concedes) wouldn't this be a logical consequence? I'm not sure that this creates a right/obligation, but I think it might and is a part of the puzzle that should be considered. I'll have to think about this more but I think there is an argument here.

This book has really made me rethink the way I view rights. Its kind of like the concept of truth--once you get over the fact that there isn't a Truth out there that you can touch and point to for all the answers, it isn't so intimidating. Before I saw all rights in a Nozickian frame; rights are constraints that are never to be violated. I think a more reasonable way to view rights is a set of claims that are all limited by each other. We modify rights over time to account for new factors that we didn't foresee. When rights conflict, we prioritize them.

I am sympathetic to the claim that group rights might be a superfluous concept. I agree that the individual right to life necessitates a right for collectives to not be killed. I also find compelling the claim that since groups aren't things capable of acting and, I think, are incapable of having obligations, it doesn't make sense to give them rights. I'd be interested in hearing counterarguments on this issue.