A Right at the End of the Tunnel

Okay, what Gewirth treats as the difference between a concrete absolutist and an abstract absolutist I call wussing out. It sort of defeats the point of a thought experiment to be like "oh! hey! maybe there are other options!" in order to make your conscience feel better about letting lots of people die. The rest of the article I found really interesting and well reasoned, but this part I think is silly.

My biggest concern here, as one trying to learn about ethics and rights, is why the distinctions that Gewirth draws between...excuses?...matter. Much as he challenges the distinction between direct and oblique intention, I am quick to question the distinction between that argument and the intervening action argument. One argument says that he didn't directly intend to do it (but it was a forseeable consequence), the other argument says that it was someone else's fault. I don't understand why one couldn't foresee the circumstances under both arguments and thus be obligated to choose to save more people. I'm rambling...I understand why the arguments are different, but the distinction just seems unimportant to me. I am not convinced that this justifies the right being absolute. I could be convinced that this puts a person in a situation so difficult that they couldn't be morally blamed either way, but I don't understand why this makes the right absolute.

I, like Mike and Cameron, am a little skeptical about how specific the original right he discuss is. It makes me wonder, again, what exactly a "right" is. He says he's talking about claim rights--but how valuable is it to speak of rights this specific? It seems like we should be able to defend broader claims, though I do find his explanation for it reasonably compelling.

I looked it up briefly, but can we discuss more the Principle of Generic Consistency?