Alan Gewirth
Encyclopedia
Alan Gewirth was an American philosopher, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

, and author of Reason and Morality, (1978), Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications (1982), The Community of Rights (1996), Self-Fulfillment (1998), and numerous other writings in moral philosophy and political philosophy
Political philosophy
Political philosophy is the study of such topics as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it...

.

Career

Gewirth is best known for his ethical rationalism, according to which a supreme moral principle, which he calls the "Principle of Generic Consistency" (PGC), is logically derivable from the nature and structure of human agency
Human agency
In philosophy and sociology, agency is the capacity of an agent to act in a world. In philosophy, the agency is considered as belonging to that agent even if that agent represents a fictitious character, or some other non-existent entity...

. The principle states that every agent must act in accordance with his or her own and all other agents' generic rights to freedom and well-being.

According to Gewirth's theory, the PGC is derivable from the fact of human agency, but it is derivable only via a dialectically-necessary mode of argumentation. The mode is "dialectical" in the sense that it presents the steps of the argument to the PGC as inferences made by an agent, rather than as statements true of the world itself. Each step is thus a description of what the agent thinks (or implicitly asserts), not what things are like independently of the viewpoint of the agent. Nevertheless, the mode of argumentation is also "necessary" both in the sense that its initial premise is inescapable from any agent's standpoint and that the subsequent steps of the proof are logically deduced from this premise.

The initial premise, which we all must accept insofar as we perform any actions, is simply "I do X for purpose E." All agents implicitly accept this assertion insofar as they perform any voluntary actions; they therefore must accept it on pain of contradicting that they are agents. Subsequent steps of the argument derive from the first and, similarly, can be denied only on pain of contradiction. Gewirth thus holds that any agent must accept the PGC on pain of contradiction because the principle is contained as the inescapable conclusion of any agent's dialectically necessary characterization of his or her own activity.

While Gewirth admits that his argument establishes the PGC only dialectically, he nevertheless claims that the principle is established as necessary, since any and all agents must accept it on pain of contradiction.

Gewirth's theory has generated much commentary and criticism. In 1991, the philosopher Deryck Beyleveld
Deryck Beyleveld
Deryck Beyleveld is founding Director of the Sheffield Institute of Biotechnological Law and Ethics , but is now the Head of the Law School at Durham University...

 published The Dialectical Necessity of Morality, an authoritative reformulation of Gewirth's argument including a summary of previously published objections and Beyleveld's own rigorous responses to them on Gewirth's behalf.

Gewirth's argument bears a (superficial) resemblance to the discourse ethics
Discourse ethics
Discourse ethics, sometimes called argumentation ethics, refers to a type of argument that attempts to establish normative or ethical truths by examining the presuppositions of discourse.-Habermas and Apel:...

 type theories of Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'...

, Karl-Otto Apel
Karl-Otto Apel
Karl-Otto Apel is a German philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the University of Frankfurt am Main. Apel worked in ethics, the philosophy of language and human sciences. He wrote extensively in these fields, publishing mostly in German...

, and others. His student Roger Pilon
Roger Pilon
Roger Pilon is Vice President for Legal Affairs for the Cato Institute, and an American libertarian legal theorist. In particular, he has developed a libertarian version of the rights theory of his teacher, noted philosopher Alan Gewirth...

 has developed a libertarian version
Discourse ethics
Discourse ethics, sometimes called argumentation ethics, refers to a type of argument that attempts to establish normative or ethical truths by examining the presuppositions of discourse.-Habermas and Apel:...

of Gewirth's theory.

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