Rights-Defeasibility and Social Justice

Negative rights considered in the abstract aren’t very controversial. It seems prima facie plausible that we have rights. I’m not going to defend a sophisticated account of the ontological basis for these rights. Like Nozick in his seminal work Anarchy, State, and Utopia, I’m just going to assume—for this purposes of this paper—that individuals do have certain rights. What I’m going to argue, then, is that it’s in principle possible for certain positive rights associated with ‘social justice ’ to be morally permissible—on a deontological, rather than utilitarian basis. I develop an account of rights-abrogation based on defeasibility conditions, while simultaneously avoiding traditional criticisms of forced labor and slavery. Since this is an original work of pure theory, citations are kept to a bare minimum. For the purposes of this paper, I take social justice to mean a particular subset of positive rights geared towards liberalism (welfare rights, discrimination, equality, healthcare, labor laws, etc.) Suppose X walks into Y’s store and—without consent—knowingly takes some of X’s goods and attempts to leave without paying. X chases after Y, pins him down, and returns the goods to his store. The operating principle is similar to the dictum: ‘my right to move my fist ends where your nose begins’. Y’s negative right not to be interfered with isn’t at all absolute