NATURAL RIGHTS AND CONVENTION Benjamin Bryan A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 2016 Committee: Fred Miller, Advisor Kevin Quinn, Graduate Faculty Representative Albert Dzur Eric Mack Kevin Vallier © 2016 Benjamin Bryan All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Fred Miller, Advisor According to natural rights theory, both individual actions and political institutions must respect people’s natural rights—those rights that belong to people in virtue of what they are (human beings or persons), not in virtue of their particular social or political circumstances. This dissertation addresses a common worry about natural rights theory, which I call the “Conventionalist Challenge.” The Conventionalist Challenge charges that natural rights theory fails to account for the ways that people’s moral rights depend on social and legal conventions. I develop a form of natural rights theory that overcomes the Conventionalist Challenge. I argue that while people have natural rights, the precise requirements of these rights are spelled out by conventions. In fact, I argue, our natural rights morally require that we create conventions that spell out the fine-grained details of what we owe one another. This view captures what is attractive about natural rights theory—the idea that all human beings have rights that political institutions (and other individuals) must respect—without denying that our moral rights also depend in important ways on local conventions. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’m thankful to a great many people for the support that made writing this dissertation possible. I’m grateful to my dissertation committee for their advice and criticism, especially to Fred Miller, whose guidance and hard questions not only have shaped my dissertation but also have given rise to several projects beyond the dissertation. I’m grateful to my other friends and colleagues at Bowling Green, who have made Bowling Green a wonderful place to do philosophy. I’m grateful to the many academic friends I’ve encountered outside my department, and even outside of the discipline of philosophy, from whom I’ve learned so much. Finally, I’m grateful to the people who made me the sort of person who could undertake such a thing as this—my family, church, undergraduate professors, and so on. I am who I am and where I am because a great many people have loved me well, and for that I am thankful. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………..... 1 CHAPTER I. THE CONVENTIONALIST CHALLENGE TO NATURAL RIGHTS THEORY…………………………………………………………………………………… 5 What are Natural Rights?........................................................................................... 5 Rights ........................................................................................................... 6 Natural Rights................................................................................................ 8 Natural Rights Theory ................................................................................... 10 The Content of Rights.................................................................................... 11 The Conventionalist Challenge…………………………………………………….. 12 Metaethical Objections .................................................................................. 12 Hume’s Conventionalist Alternative ............................................................. 15 Holmes and Sunstein’s Commendable Caution............................................. 18 Murphy and Nagel on Property ..................................................................... 20 The Conventionalist Challenge...................................................................... 23 Shifting the Burden.................................................................................................... 27 In Defense of Premise 1: The Need for Convention...................................... 27 In Defense of Premise 2: Two Burdens for Natural Rights Theory .............. 28 Responding to the Conventionalist Challenge............................................... 31 CHAPTER II. CONSTRAINTS ON CONVENTION…………………………………. .... 33 Natural Rights and Convention.................................................................................. 33 Mind the Gaps: Why We Need Convention .................................................. 34 vi How Convention Fills in the Gaps................................................................. 38 The Moral Importance of Convention ........................................................... 41 The Problem of Constraint…………………………………………………………. 43 Two Kinds of Constraints.............................................................................. 44 An Illustration: Constraints on Property Conventions................................... 45 The Problem of Constraint as a Problem for Particular Forms of Natural Rights Theory ................................................................................................ 52 Conclusion………………………………………………………… ......................... 55 CHAPTER III. THE DUTY TO FILL IN THE GAPS………………………. ................... 58 It Takes a Village to Respect Rights……………………………………………….. 59 The Importance of Conventions……………………………………………… ........ 61 The Duty to Fill in the Gaps ...................................................................................... 64 A Duty To Keep to Yourself?.................................................................................... 70 Solving the Problem of Authority.............................................................................. 73 A Caveat about Following Conventions..................................................................... 73 Changing Conventions............................................................................................... 77 Conclusion………………………………………………………… ......................... 79 CHAPTER IV. POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS……………………………. ...................... 81 Political Obligation and the Duty to Fill in the Gaps ................................................ 82 The Difficulty of Coordination ...................................................................... 82 Legitimacy ..................................................................................................... 85 Political Obligation........................................................................................ 87 The Particularity Requirement....................................................................... 89 Commonsense Exceptions to the Duty to Obey the Law .............................. 90 vii Paying the Cost of Coordination.................................................................... 92 A Solution to a Lockean Problem.................................................................. 93 Non-Aristotelian Political Animals ........................................................................... 95 Political Animals............................................................................................ 95 Natural and Political Justice .......................................................................... 97 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………….. 101 1 INTRODUCTION Natural rights theory is, on its surface, an attractively straightforward view about political morality: all human beings have basic moral rights that everyone—individuals and governments alike—must respect. These moral rights are independent of the legal rights created by particular political communities and place moral constraints on what kinds of laws communities may create. Consider two classic articulations of the view: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.1 [I]t is certain there is a such a Law [i.e., the natural law], and that too, as intelligible and plain to a rational Creature, and a Studier of that Law, as the positive Laws of Common- wealths, nay possibly plainer; As much as Reason is easier to be understood than the Phansies and intricate Contrivances of Men, following contrary and hidden interests put into Words; For so truly are a greater part of the Municipal Laws of Countries, which are only so far right, as they are founded on the Law of Nature, by which they are to be regulated and interpreted.2 The first of these passages, a familiar one from the United States’ Declaration of Independence, testifies to the impact of the natural rights approach in political practice. The second, from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, testifies to its prominence in the history of political thought. The two share a common vision of the relationship between morality and politics: there are moral requirements that precede political institutions, and whether political institutions are morally acceptable depends on whether they respect these moral requirements. 1 http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html 2 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter J. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), II.12. Italics in original. All references to Locke’s Two Treatises indicate the number