13.3 — Rules, Duties and Rights

The second great answer, and it starts from the observation that 13.2 ended on.

Some things are wrong regardless of the outcome.

Not "wrong because they produce bad results" — wrong in themselves. Torturing a child for entertainment does not become acceptable if the entertainment value is high enough, and a theory that says it could is refuted by that.

The technical name

Deontology, from deon, duty. The view that rightness is a property of the act rather than of its results.

And its main developed form is Kant's (10.9), whose two usable tests are:

Can you will the rule you are acting on as a universal law? Which catches free-riding — the wrongs that only work because most people do not do them.

And are you treating the person merely as a means? Which is tested by asking whether you could tell them exactly what you are doing and why.

Rights

And the modern political form of the same idea.

A right is a claim that holds even when overriding it would produce a better total.

That is exactly what makes it a right rather than a strong interest. If your right to a fair trial evaporates whenever convicting you would produce more social benefit, you do not have a right; you have a presumption that can be outbid.

Which is why the language of rights is the standard defence against consequentialist arguments for doing terrible things to individuals for a larger good.

And two kinds are worth distinguishing.

Negative rights — claims that others not do something to you. Not to be killed, imprisoned without trial, tortured, or have your property taken. These are cheap to respect: everybody satisfies them by not acting.

Positive rights — claims that others provide something. To healthcare, education, subsistence. These require somebody to do something and cost resources, which is why they are more contested.

And the honest observation: the distinction is less clean than it looks. A right not to be robbed requires police, courts and prisons, which cost money. Every right has enforcement costs.

The strengths

Three, and they are the mirror of consequentialism's failures.

It protects individuals. You cannot be sacrificed for an aggregate, which is the transplant case handled correctly by construction rather than by repair.

It does not require you to predict the future. You can know whether you are lying now; you cannot know what will follow from it in ten years. A theory that only requires you to assess what you are doing is enormously more usable.

And it is resistant to manipulation. You cannot adjust the estimates until the answer suits you, because there are no estimates.

The problems

The wall

And this is the one this whole volume keeps arriving at.

An absolute rule will eventually meet a case where following it is monstrous.

Kant's murderer at the door (10.9). Rama's code producing the exile of Sita (2.15). Bhishma's vow ruining four generations (3.2). Cú Chulainn's two prohibitions contradicting each other (11.12). Yudhishthira's honesty walking him into a dice hall (3.8).

Five traditions, and the same finding.

And the deeper version: rules conflict with each other. Do not lie and do not let an innocent person be killed are both rules, and the murderer at the door puts them in direct opposition, and no rule ranks the rules.

Rigidity

A theory built on principles that hold regardless of consequences will, when the consequences are catastrophic, still say to follow the principle.

And the standard defences — that the rule is more precisely specified than it looked, or that another duty applies — are repairs, and they concede that judgement is doing work that the rules were supposed to do.

And where the rules come from

Kant derives his from reason. Religious traditions derive theirs from revelation. Modern rights language derives its from a mixture of intuition, history and negotiation.

And none of those is unproblematic. The is-ought gap (13.1) applies here as everywhere.

What survives

Two things, and they are worth more than the theory.

Constraints, not absolutes

The defensible version of the position is not "these rules can never be broken" but "these rules are not to be traded off in ordinary calculation."

A constraint that yields only to an extreme case is a genuinely different thing from a strong preference. It means the calculation does not get run — you do not sit down and work out whether torturing this person is net positive, because that is not the kind of question that gets asked.

And the practical value of that is enormous, because the calculation is exactly where the manipulation happens (13.2).

And Krishna's three tests

From 4.11, and they belong here as the answer to the wall.

If you are going to break a rule that is otherwise binding:

Who benefits? A rule broken for somebody else's protection is a different act from one broken for your own advantage.

Will you say out loud that you broke it? A breach acknowledged as a breach leaves the rule standing. A breach smuggled in under a redefinition destroys it — Yudhishthira's whispered "the elephant" is the corrupt move, not the lie (3.14).

And will you take the charge? A person who breaks a rule and argues they should not be held to it has not made an exception; they have made a new rule that suits them.

Those three do not resolve the philosophical problem. They are a procedure that catches the abuse, which is what you actually need.

Duties, in practice

One more thing this framework supplies that consequentialism does not.

Special obligations.

You owe things to your children, your parents, your friends and the people you have made promises to that you do not owe to strangers.

Consequentialism struggles with this — if everybody counts equally, why is your child's welfare more your business than anybody's? The consequentialist answers are all indirect: a world where people care for their own works better.

And that answer, while probably true, does not describe the obligation as it is actually experienced. You do not care for your child because it is an efficient allocation.

The duty-based framework handles it directly: a relationship generates obligations, and the obligations are real and are not the same as the general ones.

8.3's account of svadharma is exactly this idea in the Indian tradition — what is yours to do is not identical to what is right in general.

What to carry from this page

A right is a claim that survives being outvoted. That is what distinguishes it from a strong interest, and it is the whole of its value.

Constraints do not have to be absolute to be useful. A rule that is not entered into the calculation is doing its job even if it can, in an extreme case, be broken.

And when you break one: who benefits, will you say it, and will you take the charge. Three questions, and they catch nearly every abuse of the exception.

And special obligations are real. You owe your people things you do not owe everybody, and a theory that cannot say so is missing something everybody knows.

Next: 13.4 — the third answer, which asks a different question entirely and which this book thinks is the most useful of the three.