Brainoil, I’m pleased to hear your argument is more nuanced than MugaSofer suggested. It helps redeem the practice of steelmanning, which is not just about making discussions more civil and nuanced but also about becoming more accurate at predicting others’ views. Utilitarians can accept ‘rights’ views, if they either reify rights and assign high value to consequences in which they are satisfied, or treat ‘rights’ as a heuristic that usefully approximates the true moral theory. So perhaps instead of talking about which abstract moral theory is the Right One, we should focus on more object-level questions like ‘Which human preferences are more satisfied by debating gay marriage than by ignoring it, and how strong are those preferences relative to their competitor-values?’
It is not privileging the question if they value something more than you do.
Sure. (Though many values people have are probably a causal product of which questions they privilege.)
Brainoil, I’m pleased to hear your argument is more nuanced than MugaSofer suggested. It helps redeem the practice of steelmanning, which is not just about making discussions more civil and nuanced but also about becoming more accurate at predicting others’ views. Utilitarians can accept ‘rights’ views, if they either reify rights and assign high value to consequences in which they are satisfied, or treat ‘rights’ as a heuristic that usefully approximates the true moral theory. So perhaps instead of talking about which abstract moral theory is the Right One, we should focus on more object-level questions like ‘Which human preferences are more satisfied by debating gay marriage than by ignoring it, and how strong are those preferences relative to their competitor-values?’
Sure. (Though many values people have are probably a causal product of which questions they privilege.)
One way to think of rights is as ethical injunctions for governments, and depending on the right others, against violating them.