Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Application by Alan Gewirth (review)

478 BOOK REVIEWS I also wonder about the suitability of I-Man for American undergraduate seminarians. Stylistically the book is inappropriate. Sentences are too lengthy and replete with distractive relative clauses and parentheses . Also, the earlier historical chapters repeatedly use technical terminology without any clarification. This manner vitiates their value for students. The editors seem sensitive to these stylistic points, for they promise an abridged edition for use as a student textbook (p. xi). What the translators of Krapiec's I-Man have given American Catholic intellectuals is not so much a text to be used as an example to be followed. Krapiec reminds us all of what we should be striving to accomplish: a presentation of Aquinas eager to synthesize new conquests of human thought and taking into particular account the type of problems and characteristics proper to the various cultures and regions. (G. Garrone, On the Study of Philosophy in Seminaries). For this example we should be deeply grateful. University of St. Thomas Houston, Texas JOHN F. x. KNASAS Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Application. By ALAN GEWIRTH. Pp. 366. Paper : Some issues are never settled. One such issue is whether there are or are not universal moral norms. Alan Gewirth's Human Rights and his earlier volume, Reason and Morality, constitute an elegant defense of universal morality. Gewirth, who is Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, joins the argument as one who stands in the tradition of Immanuel Kant. Gewirth seeks to prove that, because all people are agents who act to bring about or attain certain goods, they are all, regardless of cultural or historical circumstances , logically constrained to say that everyone has certain basic rights. Gewirth articulates his own version of Kant's Categorical Imperative, what he ea!ls the Principle of Generic Consistency or the PGC, according to which every moral agent must "act in accord with his recipients' generic rights as well as his own." Gewirth's project is to forge a logically necessary link between human rights and the necessary conditions of human action. He seeks to accomplish his end by considering all agents apart from any particularizing characteristics they might have. His work is a major achievement and must be taken account of, particularly by anyone interested in natural law theory. His argument is one that applies to all people in all cul- BOOK REVIEWS 479 tures and in all times. It concerns moral agents as such and so stands in interesting contrast to the position of Michael Walzer in his recent book Spheres of Justice. It is Walzer's view that justice, and so human rights, cannot be discussed in a meaningful way apart from given cultural and historical circumstances. Gewirth takes an opposite tack. The course of his argument is long and complex but Alasdair Macintyre is right to say that the heart of Gewirth's position lies in this claim which he makes in Reason and Morality . " Since the agent regards as necessary goods the freedom and wellbeing that constitute the generic features of his successful action, he logically must also hold that he has rights to these generic features and he implicitly makes a corresponding rights claim." Human Rights is a collection of fourteen essays (to which Gewirth has added a helpful introduction) which further state and defend this thesis or apply it. Of particular interest are the final eight essays in which the PGC is applied to certain basic moral issues. The essays, among other things, discuss health care, starvation, military obligation, civil disobedience , and civil liberties. Gewirth's moral theory is well known and has already generated a considerable secondary literature. The basic objection to his position is this. It is one thing to say that one needs or wants or will be benefited by something and quite another to say that one has a right to that thing. (See Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue, p. 64.) Those who defend a more relativist view of human rights and moral obligation obviously must deny that such a connection exists or claim that, even if it does, the " rights " generated are as empty of specific content and as inapplicable as Kant's...