Jamal Greene: belief

Transcript context

…Say an autistic person says, “Well, I hate fluorescent lighting. You need to change the lighting in the workplace.” The employer comes back and says, “Well, at least I need to know you’re autistic. Where is your diagnosis?” That seems like a pattern we might expect, whether we like it or not. It’s not some accommodation that simply helps everyone. The lighting is one way or another. Could that be a right that has partial recognition? It is the case that if you make more claims legally available, people may argue about whether those claims should be recognized. In the particular context of disability, the problem that I see is that there are genuine claims of right, genuine claims of justice that are unrecognized. The fact that someone who has a disability is not being accommodated is something that counts as a cost for me. The fact that it also means that legal claims will be involved is something that I think is overcome by the connection between the actual accommodation and what we think justice requires. The flip side of that is, there are lots of rights that we have in our culture that are not actually connected to any deep conception of justice. I have a right to watch pornography in my home. If the state said that I don’t have that right, that’s costly to me, but the connection between that and, I think, many of our conceptions of justice is much weaker than the connection when it comes to disability rights. It’s not that I’m saying we don’t have many rights now and we should have many more. It’s that there’s a misalignment between the rights that we think are worth it and the rights that we don’t think are worth it. I’m a fan of Robert Nozick, though not in the absolutist sense. Nonetheless, I believe there’s some right to economic liberty. So if a state set up, say, occupational licensing for interior designers, I would want at least a state court to strike that down and say that’s a violation of the right of economic liberty, and that there’s no other overriding concern. What would be an example where you would want a policy struck down for violating economic liberty?…

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