Scanlon

I'm in with Ernie on this one, in that, I found myself reading sections going "ok I understand this" and then Scanlon switches to something else, and I'm thinking "ok I understand this too" but I just don't understand how it all ties together. I see that he is trying to get away from strict utilitarianism by accomodating rights through what may be called rule-utilitarianism, and I see the different considerations that he is going through, but is that the big picture? I'm not sure.

I did appreciate the larger points on rights, in general, such as what should be considered, and what are the consequences of certain things, and what are the values in others. For example, on page 141, when discussing the consequences and their values, he states, "A theory that respects autonomy will be one that assigns all these factors their proper weight," and then goes on to talk about the proper weight through fairness and equality. He proposes an "equality of distributions" and "fairness of processes" which of course there are questions with both terms 'fairness' and 'equality' as to what they mean and what the proper distribution is, etc... He states that fairness and equality are "morally desirable" but can also have costs, but the costs are difficult to determine, as well.

It is also ambiguous to me when he states that the main concern of most rights is the promotion and maintenance "of an acceptable distribution of control over important factors in our lives" (148). I'm not sure if he is saying that this is what rights ought to be concerned with or if that's the way he views rights as currently being.