ABSTRACT
The centrepiece of Gewirth's Ethical Rationalism is the argument for the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC), and Gewirthian scholars (and perhaps even those with a mere passing acquaintance) are familiar with its three-stage structure as presented in Gewirth's Reason and Morality. Gewirth says:
First, every agent implicitly makes evaluative judgments about the goodness of his purposes and hence about the necessary goodness of the freedom and well-being that are necessary conditions of his acting to achieve his purposes. Second, because of this necessary goodness, every agent implicitly makes a deontic judgment in which he claims that he has rights to freedom and well-being. Third, every agent must claim these rights for the sufficient reason that he is a prospective agent who has purposes he wants to fulfill, so that he logically must accept the generalization that all prospective purposive agents have rights to freedom and well-being. 1
