Sunday, March 1, 2009

trumps

From what I am gathering from this article Dworkin is making the argument that in a utilitarian system there must be some rights in order to prevent the system from undermining itself. The right he talks about is the right to equality which is a trump against a society with Nazis or Sarah-lovers in that it prevents peoples preferences(no matter how strong) from creating a system that counts some people as more than others. He explains that if we allow for rights as trumps then utilitarians concerned with preferences will now have the tools necessary to assert its own system above others preferred in a society without contradicting themselves.
This makes sense to me if we are dealing with a utilitarian system that is based on maximizing preferences but what about a system of utility that is not concerned with maximizing preferences, instead the system is interested in looking to experts to see what would be most likely to be the best for society. Would this form of utility still need rights? It seems to me his argument for why a right is important to utilitarians would not make sense in this system because preferences(no matter how strong) wont in a meaningful way change what is actually best for society. The right would probably end up being respected most of the time anyways but that isn't really the point.

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