After rights: A response to Alasdair MacIntyre's critique of rights

This dissertation considers whether Alasdair MacIntyre's reasons for rejecting rights terms are cogent. On my interpretation, MacIntyre makes three main arguments to justify the claim that rights are inimical to virtue ethics. First, MacIntyre offers philosophical arguments to show that rights simply do not exist. Second, MacIntyre argues on the basis of historical evidence that rights are survival terms. And third, MacIntyre argues on the basis of empirical observations of current-day politics that the use of rights language disrupts deliberation about the common good. Taken together, MacIntyre's philosophical, historical, and empirical arguments constitute a strong critique of rights discourse in contemporary society.;My thesis is that MacIntyre's arguments against rights are susceptible to counterarguments. Briefly, these are my counterarguments: first, it can be argued that rights exist as relations connected with the virtue of justice; second, it is historically the case that the modern senses of the term "rights" emerged in milieu of 12th century canon law, not the milieu of social strife involved in the 14th century property debate which MacIntyre assumed was their origin; and third, the claim that governing institutions of modern nations are wholly dominated by interest groups which allow for no deliberation about the common good is not borne out by the latest empirical political science research. His claim that rights are inimical to virtue ethics is therefore not justified. My conclusion is based on evidence drawn from other virtue ethics philosophers such as Elizabeth Anscombe, from medieval historians who consider the topic of rights such as Brian Tierney, and from a new field in political science called Deliberative Democracy.;My plan is to describe MacIntyre's arguments at length, propose counterarguments against each of them, and show what parts of his virtue ethics account must be altered once his premise rejecting rights is removed. Part of MacIntyre's project was to show that rights and certain other theories in modern ethics fail on their own terms. By considering more closely what the terms of rights theories entail, I show that not all theories of rights presuppose a rejection of a teleological ordering of human life.