Side constraints: are rights structural limits on action rather than goals to be promoted?

Robert Nozick, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Rights function as side constraints on action rather than as goals to be promoted. A goal-based theory would tell agents to minimize total rights violations across the world; a side-constraint theory tells each agent that there are things she may not do, regardless of consequences. The structural difference matters: a goal-based theory permits violating rights in the present to prevent more rights violations later (the standard utilitarian-of-rights move); a side-constraint theory forbids violating rights even to prevent worse rights violations elsewhere.¹

The deeper rationale is the separateness of persons: there is no super-entity (society, the social whole, humanity) for whose sake one person may be sacrificed to another. To use a person as a mere means — even for the sake of preventing other uses-as-mere-means — is the central moral wrong, and side constraints are the structure that forbids it. The Kantian inheritance is direct: humanity is always to be treated as an end and never merely as a means.²³

Sources

1. How can a concern for the nonviolation of C lead co the refusal to violate C even when this would prevent other more extensive violations of C? What is the rationale for placing the nonviolation of rights as a side constraint upon action instead of including it solely as a goal of one's actions?

   Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 31

2. A mob rampaging through a part of town killing and burning will violate the rights of those living there. Therefore, someone might try to justify his punishing another he knows to be innocent of a crime that enraged a mob, on the grounds that punishing this innocent person would help to avoid even greater violations of rights by others, and so would lead to a minimum weighted score for rights violations in the…

   Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 29–30

3. Note that these injunctions do not require us to maintain or increase the presence of the (basic moral) characteristic in the world; they simply forbid destroying it.

   Philosophical Explanations, pp. 476–477

Where the argument is made

• Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Chapter 3 (Moral Constraints and the State)
• Philippa Foot's earlier work on the doing/allowing distinction

How the argument was received

One of the most influential moves in late-twentieth-century moral philosophy. Side constraints reshaped how moral philosophy thought about the structure of obligations, and the goal-versus-side-constraint distinction is now standard. Pettit's chapter in Schmidtz offers the most sophisticated contemporary critique from a non-consequentialist who nonetheless rejects pure side constraints. Scheffler's Rejection of Consequentialism developed a hybrid position — agent-centered prerogatives but no agent-centered restrictions — that engages Nozick's framework. The standard consequentialist reply is that side constraints produce monstrous results when respecting them allows worse rights violations to occur.