Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager

214 Randall G. Holcombeand price controls or government credit allocation, according to the apparentmerits of the individual case; they reject narrowly focused cost-benefit calculations.Instead of being framed by case-by-case expediency, policy shouldconform to persons’ rights.(1985: 260)Yeager answers this natural rights approach by saying,Unfortunately, the door is open to interventionist demands anyway. Libertarianscannot keep it closed by issuing methodological pronouncements or byreporting their intuitions about endangered rights. A pure rights position,untainted by utilitarian aspects, might serve for warding off illegitimate orundesirable interventions if it enjoyed general acceptance. Although it might beconvenient if a particular doctrine were true and generally accepted, that conveniencealone is no evidence, unfortunately, that the doctrine is in fact true.(1985: 260)Yeager then accepts “a pro-rights doctrine, provided that propositions aboutrights are recognized not as purely positive propositions of fact and logic but ratheras normative propositions” (1985: 261). Not surprisingly, Yeager then wants tosupport his pro-rights doctrine based on the utilitarian argument that people arebetter off with policies that protect their rights.Yeager takes issue with natural rights supporters such as Rothbard (1982) whoderive their doctrine from axioms such as Lockean self-ownership. “Supposedaxioms about rights cannot serve as the ultimate foundation of one’s conception ofdesirable arrangements. Instead, propositions about rights must be argued for,along with other propositions about what makes for a good society” (1985: 263).Yeager goes on to suggest that:Even several rights theorists who disavow utilitarianism do tacitly employ a versionsimilar to the one recommended in this paper. I ask them to conduct amental experiment. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, it could be demonstratedthat insistence on the inviolability of human rights as they conceive ofthem would lead to general misery, whereas a pragmatic policy of respectingrights or not as conditions seemed to recommend would lead to generalhappiness. Would those theorists still insist on the inviolability of rights as thesupreme goal to be upheld even at the cost of prevalent human misery?(1985: 285–6)Unless the answer to this question is yes, Yeager argues, their rights theories arebased on a utilitarian foundation. 6While Yeager’s argument may work against some specific individuals’ rightstheories, it does not undermine the normative advocacy of rights protection as thefoundation for policy espousal. We can accept the argument that the protection ofrights is desirable on utilitarian grounds, but then use rights rather than utility as