Abstract

The central thesis of my dissertation is that the concern consequentialists have for promoting "the good" has a place in moral theory, but only when it is taken as a guiding concern of governments which apply it within contractually based deontological restrictions, and as one concern among many for fully moral agents in their private lives. ;Following Kant's lead, I take it that there are two distinct components to a fully moral social contract, each corresponding to a type of freedom. Rights are based on the ideal of harmonizing the exercise of external freedom, thereby allowing people to see themselves as normatively protected in the legitimate pursuit of their own ends. The idea of the good is based on the ideal of harmonizing the exercise of internal freedom, thereby allowing people to see their lives as having interpersonally accessible value. ;I argue that there can be two conceptions of the good: a consequentialist one and a moral one. The consequentialist good is developed without first leaving room for an independently grounded concern with rights. The moral good, in contrast, is developed to function in concert with a commitment to rights. For the two to function together, however, the concern for rights must be given a kind of conceptual priority. I argue for this point in two ways. First, I argue that deontological restrictions reflect an essential feature of rights, and consequentialism at best cannot properly account for them. Second, I argue that if we use the consequentialist good, there would still be a need to coordinate people's efforts, but this need for coordination would fall well short of grounding a proper concern for rights