Against Extrinsic Accounts of Rights

In my last post, I examined two papers which tried to identify a morally relevant difference between abortion and infanticide. The first paper argued that there are two ways an individual can be a person: either “i. an individual capable of conceiving of herself as the subject of a life that she values” and/or “ii. an individual capable of valuing certain aims, for which the continuation of her life is instrumentally necessary” (see here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/39/5/353). The second article argued that personhood can be conferred on a person in virtue of the relations an individual shares with other persons. I argued that both views failed, but I realized that there is a more fundamental problem with the second paper’s thesis than I originally thought.


On this view, the personhood that an infant has is an extrinsic property since it is in virtue of extrinsic relations that the infant is a person. Extrinsic views of rights, however, fall into circularity rather quickly: if there are two persons and each person is a person in virtue of the relation they bear to the other person, then person A will both receive his personhood from person B and give it to person B; this requires that the property of personhood both prior to and posterior to person A, which violates the law of non-contradiction. 


Now, I assume that Porter would also say that some individuals are persons in virtue of their intrinsic properties, but this is another discussion. What does seem clear is that purely extrinsic views of rights are vacuous.

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