Rights are powerful moral resources, providing freedom from
oppression and cruelty, as well as enabling us to pursue our
conceptions of the good. I investigate the connection between rights
and equality, addressing the extent to which embracing a rights
framework can help us to promote the right of persons to be treated
as equals.
I argue in chapter one that a fundamental right to equality is
grounded in our view of persons as inherently dignified and
inviolable. This right, to treatment as equals, grounds a more formal
right to equality, the right to similar treatment insofar as one is
similarly situated. My question is how well rights serve our
commitment to equality so understood.
In chapter two I defend rights against three important challenges I
call the “fixity” “perceptual myopia”, and
“indeterminism” objections. I argue that rights are
revisable, not fixed; that honoring them requires attunement to
context incompatible with perceptual myopia; and that the
specification of rights renders them determinate rather than
indeterminate.
In chapter three I articulate and address two crucial challenges: the
problem of false neutrality and the dilemma of difference, each of
which limits how well rights serve equality. Promoting and protecting
equality, which formally requires that we treat similar cases
similarly, requires that we be able to identify what differences are
relevant among cases, and what the relevance of those differences is.
By attaching normative weight to the assignment of differences, false
neutrality makes equality difficult to achieve. Further, it creates a
background against which either recognizing or ignoring differences
can hinder individuals because of the normative weight of those
differences. False neutrality is a vexing problem for rights, and the
best we can hope for, in pursuing equality, is to minimize it.
Minimizing this problem will, as I argue in chapter four, require
that rights be supplemented. By imaginatively reconstructing the
perspective of another, and by raising our deliberations to the level
of communal discussion, we can avoid false neutrality, exposing the
unstated norms and hidden biases that load assignments of difference
and make equality difficult to achieve.
Notes:
Mentor: Alisa L. Carse.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Georgetown University, 2000.
Electronic reproduction.Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest Information and
Learning Company,2005.System requirements: Adobe Acrobat
Reader.Available via World Wide Web.Digital version of: Rights,
equality, and the challenge of difference.
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