ABSTRACT
I would like to begin by conducting a thought experiment. Try to imagine Nowheresvilie – a world very much like our own except that no one, or hardly any one (the qualification is not important), has rights. If this flaw makes Nowheresvilie too ugly to hold very long in contemplation, we can make it as pretty as we wish in other moral respects. We can, for example, make the human beings in it as attractive and virtuous as possible without taxing our conceptions of the limits of human nature. In particular, let the virtues of moral sensibility flourish. Fill this imagined world with as much benevolence, compassion, sympathy, and pity as it will conveniently hold without strain. Now we can imagine men helping one another from compassionate motives merely, quite as much or even more than they do in our actual world from a variety of more complicated motives.
