Drawing on the more fundamental ethical reservoir of standards

DURING THE LAST several decades something of a renewal in natural law and rights theorizing has emerged in political philosophy. Until around 1970 the dominant theme in contemporary moral and political philosophy was noncognitivism, notably variations of evotivism, the view that when we judge some act or institution morally right or wrong, what we are doing is giving expression to our feelings about it (or trying to induce a similar feeling in others toward it). This was a result of the empiricist/logical positivist movement in epistemology and meta-ethics in terms of which no proposition or judgment could be meaningful (i.e., capable of expressing some truth) unless its terms could be specified as relating to sensory or perceptual (conscious) inputs. Starting, roughly, with John Rawls’s A Theory ofJustice (1971), moral and political theory has experienced a rebirth. Even before Rawls published his major work, hints of a rejuvenation of cognitivist ethics could be detected. Outside academic philosophy, but not without some direct influence upon it, Ayn Rand, the novelist who wrote The Fountainhead (1946) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), began the formulation of her neo-Aristotelian philosophy of objectivism, which attempted to ground ethics and politics in objective standards, specifically on a conception of human nature that Rand backed up with a metaphysics and an epistemology aimed at overcoming traditional difficulties with Aristotelian naturalism.’ From the efforts of Rand arose the more academically oriented works, specifically in natural rights theory, of such philosophers as Eric Mack, Fred Miller, Jr., Douglas Rasmussen, Douglas J. Den Uyl, myself, and others? Not all followed the objectivist approach, and those who did often modified some of Rand‘s ideas as the need arose. By now, however, a rather comprehensive body of work, arguing for natural rights in the Lockean political tradition but with Aristotelian philosophical foundations, is on record, one that eschews the wrongheadedness we find in the left-wing revisionist discussions of “human” rights? In a recent paper entitled “Against Natural Rights,” published in a journal that is customarily friendly toward the kind of h-ee society that the Lockean natural rights theory is often seen as supporting, Professor Ernest van den Haag reverses this trend and attacks natural rights! Van den Haag, who is well known for his championship of conservative legal theorye.g., the death penalty, community censorship of pornography, et cetera-attacks not so much the Lockean tradition, or especially the objectivist development of this tradition, but rather the welfare statist or socialist revisionist school of rights theo-