Sunday, March 1, 2009

Trumps

Dworkin writes, “We might argue that further analysis of the grounds that we have for accepting utilitarianism as a background justification in the first place – further reflection of why we wish to pursue that goal – shows that utility must yield to some right of moral independence here.”(154). He calls these rights, rights as trumps. To take this position, as stated above, one needs to correctly understand utilitarianism; some utilitarian’s and non-utilitarian’s perhaps, do not always define utilitarianism and understand the position “correctly” as Dworkin would argue. When one fully understands the utilitarianism position, then one would understand that in utilitarianism, this trumping of some rights over other rights will justify itself.

The neutral-utilitarianism positions is self-contradictory, because it tries to defeat the false theory (that some people’s right should count more for others) and strives to fulfill the political preference of those who believe in the false theory. And he argues that in order for a utilitarian political theory to be attractive enough as to be taken serious, it needs to be qualified to be able to "restrict the preferences that count by excluding political preferences.”(158). What I am taking from this, and correct me if I am wrong, is that the current widely held utilitarian view is self undermining and it tries to accommodate two different sets of preferences but it cannot without contradicting itself. So he is talking about how rights should be seen as trumps, and thus justified in that sense, because the right to moral independence is and should be a utilitarian view, so that it does not undermine itself by not allowing some rights to take preference over others. So that what utilitarianism really stands for, equal rights for all, in some cases some rights need to be allowed or accepted even though the majority may not view them as “moral”. But because if some of these rights deal with morals, they cannot be taken away without having to take away many more rights that would coincide with certain positions.

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