GEORGIA LAW REVIEW - StephanKinsella.com

GEORGIA LAW REWEW [Vol. 13: 1143
The above argument has provided the outline of a rational justifi-
cation of the Principle of Generic Consistency as the supreme prin-
ciple of morality, both for the formal reason that if any agent denies
or violates the principle he contradicts himself and for the material
reason that its content, the generic features of action, necessarily
imposes itself on every agent. For it is necessarily true of every agent
that he at least implicitly attributes to himself the generic rights
and that he acts in accord with his own generic rights; hence, he
cannot rationally evade the extension of these rights to his recipi-
ents. This material necessity stands in contrast to principles cen-
tered in the purposes, inclinations, or ideals for which some agent
may contingently act and whose requirements he may hence evade
by shifting his desires or opinions. The PGC is the supreme principle
of morality because its interpersonal requirements, derived from the
generic features of action, cannot rationally be evaded by any agent.
(It must be kept in mind that action is the universal context of
morality). The main point may be put succinctly as follows: What
for any agent are necessarily goods of action, namely, freedom and
well-being, are equally necessary goods for his recipients, and he
logically must admit that they have as much right to these goods
as he does, since the ground or reason for which he rationally claims
them for himself also pertains to his recipients.
We have now seen that every agent must hold, on pain of self-
contradiction, that all other persons as well as himself have moral
rights grounded in the PGC as the principle of morality. It follows
from the argument to the PGC that the primary criterion for having
moral rights is that all persons have certain needs relative to their
being actual or prospective agents, namely, needs for freedom and
well-being as the necessary conditions of action. Simply by virtue
of being actual or prospective agents who have certain needs of
agency, persons have moral rights to freedom and well-being. Since
all humans are such agents having such needs, the generic moral
rights to freedom and well-being are human rights.
This argument for human rights has avoided the problem of how
rights can be logically derived from facts. For, in proceeding by the
dialectically necessary method, it has remained throughout within
the facts of agents' necessary judgments about goods and rights.
The argument has established not that persons have rights tout
court but rather that all agents logically must claim or at least
accept that they have certain rights. This relativity to agents and
their claims does not, however, remove the absoluteness of rights or