PHIL 307 Lecture Notes - Lecture 24: Local Exchange Trading System, Communitarianism, Atomism

• School: Rider University
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: PHIL 307
• Professor: Sher George

Document Summary

We have a right to control our holdings and talents and so on. If we are withholding this, then we aren"t doing anything wrong. Taylor"s argument isn"t that we don"t have rights, but it targets the primacy part of the primacy of rights thesis. It can"t be that rights are the exclusive starting point for a moral or political theory. When we excavate the presuppositions, we find that we are committed to some other normative things that hold obligations, etc. If we have rights, then we must also have obligations of the kind that nozick denies. In the notion of this argument, he relies on atomism We are self-sufficient in the sense that we can be who we are even in the absence of the social context in which we in fact exist. This does not depend on facts about the society in which we are embedded. Each of us is independent of all the other atoms.