Rights and Dignitary Interests Sample Clauses

Rights and Dignitary Interests. Another objection to the duty to avoid trouble is that it does not fully appreciate the moral cost to Betty of staying home. So far, I have claimed that Betty’s interest in being at the party does not seem sufficient to outweigh the inherent value of Albert’s interest in not being killed or seriously harmed. But, as briefly highlighted at the end of the previous chapter, we are not simply asking Betty to forgo something that she wants. We are asking her to “concede what is [hers] by right” (Finlay 2015, p. 64). The moral cost to her of staying home is not equivalent to simply missing out on the party because she missed the last train there. It is worse because she would be prohibited from exercising her right to go to the party. Once we factor in that, the argument goes, we should weigh the cost to her of not going to the party more than the value of Albert’s interest in not being killed or seriously harmed. I am unconvinced. First, saying that Betty has a right to go to the party is question- begging if we take it to mean that she is permitted to do, of course. Instead, let me outline two alternative ways of understanding this proposal. One is that Betty, in an ideal sense, ought to be free to go to the party and ought not to be required to stay home, and we should therefore weigh the cost to her of not going more heavily than we should if her freedom to go to the party was jeopardised in some other way (say, because she would have to steal someone’s car to get there on time). Thus, the cost to her of staying home should outweigh Albert’s interests’ value.42 Another slightly different way of understanding the situation here comes from Marga- ret Raymond (2010). Applying her argument concerning cases similar to Dangerous Party, the idea is Betty has two different interests in going to the party. The first is her interest in going to the party and having fun. The second is a “dignitary interest”, which is a person’s “interest in being permitted to move about freely and to pursue those activities fundamental to a free society, without being subjugated to the unlawful demands of another actor” (2017, p. 323; emphasis added). The dignitary interest seems clearly involved in conditional threat cases, where there is a deliberate attempt to coerce and restrict the victim’s freedom by threatening to do some- thing worse.43 It is less obvious to me that it is present in Dangerous Party since Betty only predicts that Albert will choose to decide to attack her if she...