Suchergebnisse

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1972, given by Alan Gewirth (1912-2004), an American philosopher.

The issue of whether morally unjustifiable means (ie, war crimes) can be used by state military forces to accomplish morally justifiable ends in times of war is contemplated. It is contended that human rights impose certain constraints on the means & ends of wartime behavior. Consequently, crimes that violate human rights committed against aggressor forces are deemed morally permissible since the perpetrators were attempting to violate the human rights of the defenders. However, two categories of war crimes that essentially violate human rights are identified: actions in which (1) aggressor states attempt to dominate other groups for purposes of self-aggrandizement regardless of such groups' human rights & (2) military forces inflict unnecessary injury (eg, rape & torture) on subjugated groups. It is claimed that justifiable ends realized through the use of unjustifiable means cannot be morally legitimized. It is concluded that international law has a moral responsibility to establish guidelines for preventing & punishing violations of human rights during times of war. J. W. Parker

Cultural pluralism is both a fact and a norm. It is a fact that our world, and indeed our society, are marked by a large diversity of cultures delineated in terms of race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, ideology, and other partly interpenetrating variables. This fact raises the normative question of whether, or to what extent, such diversities should be recognized or even encouraged in policies concerning government, law, education, employment, the family, immigration, and other important areas of social concern.

How can anyone be opposed to private philanthropy? Such philanthropy consists in persons freely giving of their wealth or other goods to benefit individuals and groups they consider worthy of support. As private persons, they act apart from – although not, of course, in contravention of – the political apparatus of the state. In acting in this beneficent way, the philanthropists are indeed, as their name etymologically implies, lovers of humanity; and their efforts are also justified as exercises of their right to freedom, including the free use of the resources they own, which they have presumably acquired by their own free efforts or by the efforts of other persons who have freely transferred these resources to them. Thus, private philanthropy combines two of the highest values of individual and social morality: personal freedom and interpersonal beneficence.I. Moral Problems of Private PhilanthropyMany questions about moral, and especially human, rights arise from private philanthropy as thus briefly characterized. These questions may be divided into three sets, which focus respectively on theagentsof philanthropy (i.e., the philanthropists themselves), on therecipientsof philanthropy, and on theobjectsfor which philanthropic awards are given. First, regarding the agents: Do they have a right to all the wealth they possess? Have they accumulated this wealth in a way that has respected the moral rights of other persons? If the answer is negative, even in part, then in what morally valid sense is all the wealth in question theirs to give away, even if they use it for philanthropic purposes: Do they have arightto give it away as they choose?

Abstract
Two main points in Maclntyre's reply to my Rights and Virtues are shown to be incorrect. First, the right-claims I attribute to every agent are based on the needs of action, and the correlative "must" hence falls within the recognized language of practical advocacy. Second, the 'conative normality' I attribute to all agents is not confined to 'the individualistic social order of modernity' but instead characterizes every agent who wants to act for the fulfillment of his or her purposes.

Abstract
It is first shown that, contrary to Maclntyre, human rights are not 'fictions'. I then summarize my own argument for human rights, and reply to Maclntyre's objections. Turning to his own positive doctrine, I indicate that it is confronted with 'the problem of moral indeterminacy', in that it allows or provides for outcomes which are mutually opposed to one another so far as concerns their moral status. I then take up Maclntyre's triadic account of the virtues and show that each phase - practice, narrative order of a single life, and moral tradition - is morally indeterminate, as are also his accounts of the morality of law and the virtue of justice. My conclusion is that moral virtues must be based on human rights if the virtues are to have morally justified contents.