Rights and Persons by A. I. Melden (review)

882 BOOK REVIEWS Rights and Persons. By A. I. MELDEN. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977. Pp. 263. $15.00. Melden here develops a theory of moral rights and of the person as a moral agent. In developing his theory Melden conducts an extended polemic against both classical and contemporary philosophers who have written on rights, especially Rawls. Although these polemics are not thoroughly developed and are often unpersuasive, they are provocative and worth pursuing-for example, the penetrating critique of the notion of prima facie rights. The development of Melden's own theory is unsatisfactory in many ways; the theory is not clearly stated and its difficulties are not squarely faced. In addition to the polemics and the articulation of his own view of rights, there is much of value in the book, for example, Melden 's discussion of the history of moral thinking about rights, his comments on the nature of moral thinking (pp. 26-27) , and his discussion of intuitionism (pp. 124-125) . According to Melden the central mistake of philosophical discussions of rights has been the tendency to regard rights as simply correlates of duties and to explain duties as what a person is obliged or duty-bound to do. This tendency results from moral philosophers' preoccupation with the rightness and wrongness of actions and leads to a neglect of the peculiar features of rights. Thus, insufficient attention has been paid to the fact that a person's having a right is often a ground for determining what one ought to do; the distinction between having a right and the justification for exercising or honoring a right has been ignored; and, most important, moral philosophers have overlooked the central fact that rights are located in the moral relations between persons, as in the right which is conferred in making a promise. The right conferred in a promise is a paradigm of special moral rights. Melden argues that attempts to understand the obligation of promises simply in terms of the thoughts or deeds of the promiser and in terms of the just requirements of the so-called " institution of promising" are bound to fail. He insists that it is necessary to focus on the relationship between the promising parties. This relationship consists in a joining of a segment of the lives of the parties based upon their interests as moral agents. This moral relation is established by the promiser's conferring of a right on the promisee. It involves on the part of the promisee a confident expectation that the promised action will be done and on the part of the promiser a ground for performing the promised action. If one does not keep one's promise, one does moral damage to the promisee and thus should experience guilt; one subverts the promisee's status as a moral agent by "interfering with or subverting endeavors he has a right to pursue " (p. 47) . BOOK REVIEWS 333 Melden holds that one might be morally obliged not to keep one's promise in a given situation. Thus, one might be morally obliged to do moral damage (p. 21). This paradoxical implication makes one wonder about the status of " moral damage." In the final analysis, it is damage to the interests one has a right to pursue (p. 172) . A person has a human right to pursue his or her interests; special rights are based on this fundamental right. Nevertheless, a person does not necessarily have a right to pursue all of his or her interests; morally self-defeating interests-for example, the interests of terrorists-are excluded (pp. 76-78). These clarifications are not sufficient, however, to render the notion of moral damage an informative one. One who breaks a promise does moral damage, but this is to say only that one violates the right of the promisee. Saying this hardly contributes to explaining the right in question, and it certainly does not explain the normative status of the right. JOSEPH M. BOYLE, JR. College of St. Thomas St. Paul, Minnesota La filosofia de la ciencia segun Santo Tomas. By JuAN Jos:E SANGUINE~!. Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 1977. Coleccion Filosofica # 25. Pp. 371. One...