The correlativity of rights and obligations is one of the few stock topics in the basic repertory of English-speaking philosophy th-t is considered suitable for assignment to philosophers specializing in political philosophy (even so it is a topic that must be shared with ethics). It is a topic perennially discussed, chiefly (I think) for reasons that have little to do with its importance: namely, just because it is a recognized topic and because it appears to be a safely tidy one that lends itself readily to being tidied up further by formal or quasi-formal considerations. For my part, I wish more effort went into discussing less tractable subjects like the individuation of rights and their delimitation vis-à-vis one another.

What I have to contribute to the subject of correlativity, returning to the scene of my comments on David Lyons’ paper, “The Correlativity of Rights and Duties,” is mainly a stint of annual or biennial repair-work, designed to restore the obvious — the truth that rights do imply obligations and cannot be understood without accepting this implication.

Of these two books by Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (MSM) is the more substantial. In it the most substantial parts of Explaining Technical Change (ETC) reappear; and in it - in its impoverished conception of contradiction - the most striking omission of ETC takes the heaviest toll. ETC is to a very considerable extent taken up with reviews of other people's work on the economics of technical change. Its Part One survey of the philosophy of social science is very rapid, with little novelty in- tended or offered. The survey is not systematically, or even incessantly, drawn upon in the Part Two discussion of technical change. MSM, by contrast, is a library of penetrating and provocative discussion, which ranks in quality with books by G.A. Cohen and John Roemer or (very different in conception and working assumptions) Richard Miller among the number of recent exactingly analytical studies of Marx's theories, and is more comprehensive than any of these.

Gauthier's thinking about the social contract continues to develop vigorously. Had I aimed my criticisms at the stage of his thinking that he had reached at the time of his reply to them, rather than at earlier stages already in print, I would have organized my argument differently. Yet the earlier stages were interesting enough—and remain so—to deserve attention for their own sake. Moreover, my criticisms, even as they stand, have some effects that transcend those stages. They undermine the assumption that there is some uniquely attractive principle, whether Gauthier's principle of maximin relative advantage or any other, for determining what bargain is going to be struck on entering the social contract. They also, I persist in thinking, expose the difficulty of bringing home the maximum claims, as matters requiring respect, to agents who may lose out by accepting them as such matters.

A central feature of David Gauthier's impressively searching version of social contract theory is the principle of maximin relative advantage. Given certain assumptions—more than he originally thought—this principle may be described as calling for maximum equal advantage, which is easier to talk about; and I shall refer to the principle under this description. Maximum equal relative advantage is equivalent to minimum equal relative concession; hence the principle of maximum equal relative advantage has a twin and mirror, the principle of minimum equal relative concession. Relative advantage and relative concession are ratios with the same denominator, the difference for a given agent between the maximum utility (umax) that she might get from the societyt o be contracted for and the minimum utility (umin) that would give her an incentive to cooperate in establishing the society and in keeping it up. The numerator for the one ratio—relative advantage—is the difference between the utility that she is actually going to gain from society (ua) and her minimum cooperative utility (umin). The numerator for the other ratio—relative concession—is the difference between her maximum utility (umax) and the utility that she is going to get (ua), in other words, the amount of utility that she foregoes in not getting her maximum.

The traditional problem of the social contract defies solution. Agents with the motivations traditionally assumed would not in the circumstances traditionally assumed voluntarily arrive at a contract or voluntarily keep it up, as we can now understand, more clearly than our illustrious predecessors, by treating the problem in terms not available to them: the terms of Prisoner's Dilemma and of the theory of public goods.

Can x need y without our being in a position to conceptualize y? Nothing, given ten seconds thought, is easier to show. Every man, woman, and child from the beginning of the human race needed Vitamin C as one ingredient in the minimum provisions for their food. It was only in this century, however, that people arrived at the concept of Vitamin C and became able to assert the need for it. On the record, we may expect more such discoveries.

From Gillian Brock's vigorous probing (Brock 1994, 1996) of my treatment of meeting needs in my book of that title (Braybrooke 1987) I have learned a good deal; and from the article published in Dialogue, which concerns in particular the connection that I made between justice and needs, I have certainly learned how my arguments for that connection might have been expressed more cogently. Yet I think that the arguments I intended, and even the arguments I expressed, escape her criticisms. She quotes a number of leading assertions drawn one by one from my text, but consolidates into one argument what are best regarded as three different, though connected, arguments, to the disadvantage of their respective strengths. She also disregards, to their disadvantage, the distinction between “respect for a person M's position”—my phrasing, meaning M's position under some assignment of benefits and burdens—and “respect for a person M”—a notion that does not come into the three arguments.

At the heart of the argument in Kymlicka's book is a principle which is characteristic of liberalism as he conceives it: attachments to a community and to the culture that it embodies are to be honoured as indispensable to intelligible personal choice (p. 47–58, 165–66, 192–93), so long as everyone with the attachments is free to examine them critically and then revise them in any or all of their features (p. 13, 48, 50–51, 167, 172). In one part of the book, the argument moves inward—diastolically—aiming, as the heart is approached, to expose various communitarian objections to liberalism as mistakes about the conditions that liberalism accepts for intelligible personal choice. In the other part of the book, the argument moves outward—systolically—aiming to demonstrate the robust support that liberalism can give the cultures of minority communities like Canadian Indians even when that support requires some restriction of the liberties of other people.

Both Hausman and Rosenberg reject McCloskey's contention that economics is no more than rhetoric, and do so with cogent reasons drawn from old-fashioned views about truth and objectivity (R, pp. 30–55; H, pp. 266–67). (Hausman's treatment of McCloskey is more nuanced, but neither of them, I think, make enough allowance for McCloskey's playfulness or for the power, on his less provocative side, of his intermittent argument for a reasonably respectable pragmatism.) Rosenberg holds, very plausibly, that the ambitions of economists run higher than rhetoric in any of its current received senses (R, pp. 51–52; H, pp. 81–82) and run closer to affiliation with natural science, though economists may, in their conception of natural science, be persisting in positivist views. (McCloskey does not deny this; on the contrary, he attributes the same ambitions to economists, but he wants them to abandon the ambitions, unless—as if this were the only way of advancing beyond positivist views—they advance to a rhetorical view of natural science [McC, pp. 16–19, 32–35, 54–57].)

The modern self, with its inwardness, its freedom and its individuality (p. ix), suffers, Taylor tells us, from disenchantment (p. 500, cf. pp. 17-18, 186). Moreover, disenchantment has come in spite of the advance, to which Taylor wishes to give full credit, that modernity has made in giving great value to ordinary life at work and in the family (p. 211). For religion, though still present as one layer of sentiment among many in the historical deposits that compose modern culture, has given ground to “disengaged instrumentalism” or to its antagonist, romantic “expressivism” (p. 498). Taylor, a philosopher of uncommonly generous spirit, is willing to find good in each of these orientations: the first, for example, has with utilitarianism put the relief of needless suffering at the top of the moral agenda (p. 331), along with redeeming from superstitious repression a number of innocent pleasures; the second has deepened human capacity, on the one hand by deepening emotions (both in the sense of oneself and in concern for others), on the other hand by gaining for them intellectual respect (pp. 294, 372, 419).