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Gewirth believes that moral judgements cannot rely on empirical facts or observations, such as whether a given society agrees that certain conduct is moral, to demonstrate their truth and objectivity. To accept this claim at face value is to beg the question and accept the moral judgement in question as correct simply because it is already seen as correct. He calls this problem that of ‘the independent variable’; that without the existence of an independent and external benchmark against which moral judgements can be assessed, their correctness can never truly be determined. To find an independent benchmark that can serve this purpose and also be accepted by all societies is, of course, a difficult task. Gewirth acknowledges this and suggests that to be universally accepted, such a benchmark must be located and grounded in something that is universally possessed by all individuals against whom moral claims can be made. He argues that the very concept of action, and the bare agency required for its pursuit, should be suitable for this given that – as was previously noted and is widely accepted – human beings are simply ‘condemned to choice and action’ because ‘self-constitution through action is our essential function as rational agents’. The concept of action is itself constructed from two further concepts, each of which possesses features relevant for moral discourse: (a) Voluntariness: Conduct must be externally sourced (i.e.: not caused by reflex or disease) an not caused by either direct or indirect compulsion; and (b) Purposiveness: Actors have goals which constitute their reason for acting. This grounding of the PGC in bare agency forms the beginning of a sequence of claims, each of which flows logically from the previous claim and applies to any action that is undertaken purposively and voluntarily. Gewirth’s argument is therefore dialectically necessary; the fact of our agency means that we are required to accept the conclusion reached – namely, the test of moral permissibility expressed by the PGC. Gewirth presented the argument for the PGC in various formats of varying complexity over the years, but it was broken down in to three main claims by Beyleveld in his own work defending the Gewirthian position. Given the clarity brought to the dialectically necessary progression of the argument by Beyleveld’s three-stage presentation, it will be adopted as the framework for the present account. Stage one of the argument for the PGC begins with a statement of what it means to be an agent from the internal viewpoint of the agent themselves: that I act purposefully and voluntarily to bring about a given end. This statement entails several value-neutral, implicit and interconnected statements. Firstly, that the agent must view the end sought as being subjectively good or of benefit to them – were this not to be the case, the agent would have no reason to attempt to attain it.12 Secondly, that an agent requires a minimum degree of both freedom and well-being in order to pursue the end being sought;13 for without a minimum degree of freedom or wellbeing, any purposive or voluntary action that seeks to progress from the internalization of the desire that is the reason for action (and which is therefore beyond mere reflex or natural impulse) cannot be carried out.14 Freedom and well-being should therefore be recognised as instrumentally necessary goods in order for any end to be achieved, and can legitimately be referred to as ‘Generic Conditions of Agency’ (GCAs).15 Stage two of the argument for the PGC continues from the identification of these GCAs. As GCAs are necessary for any end to be achieved, any agent must, from their own internal point of view, see interference with their GCAs without their consent as undesirable. If the agent must view such non-consensual interference as unjustifiable, this is analogous to a belief that they have a claimright that their GCAs ought not to be interfered with without their consent.16 It should be noted, however, that at this stage in Gewirth’s argument, the ‘right’ and ‘ought’ are not, in and of themselves, moral claims. They may have other normative foundations, such as pragmatism or aesthetics; for until the consideration of others’ interests outside the agent, without the principle of reciprocity and interaction, no moral principle is brought into play.17 It may be asked, then, why such claims to freedom and wellbeing should be classified as rights and not as merely egoistic demands. Gewirth suggests that is because rights, unlike demands, require certain criteria be fulfilled which are supplied by the PGC: (a) Rights claims must be grounded in a valid, legitimate and justifiable claim based on entitlement. (b) Such entitlement must be grounded in valid rules or other identifiable reasons. (c) Rights claims require a community to be addressed towards which understands the legitimacy of the rules or reasons upon which the rights claim is based. (d) Such a community must be both legal and political in nature.18 The initial claim-right therefore exists because

the goods of freedom and wellbeing are not necessary for a specific act (E) but are required for action itself. It is therefore impossible to waive these specific rights and remain an agent; since noninterference is therefore necessary for action itself, the four conditions above are met and GCAs can be legitimately claimed as rights.19 This conclusion flows directly from the point at which stage one of the argument ends: given that an agent must recognise their GCAs as instrumentally necessary goods, universally necessary for any end, that they must make prudential claim-rights to them is a logical necessity. It is this inescapable progression of the argument, that one is bound to accept stage two if one also accepts stage one, demonstrating the dialectically necessary structure of Gewirth’s claim. From this necessary conclusion, stage three of the argument attempts to universalise the rights-claim made from the internal viewpoint of one agent to all other agents. For if I must necessarily claim my GCAs as rights because of the inescapable fact of my own agency, then so too must all other agents. I am required to accept this conclusion because it is self-reflexive. Refusal to acknowledge that other agents are capable of making rights-claims because of their agency means one of two things: either I reject agency as the foundation of my own rights claim and conclude I cannot claim rights to my GCAs, which is irrational insofar as it rejects the dialectically necessary argument presented to this point, or I deny that I am an agent at all. As both denials require the agent to use their agency, and thus rely on their GCAs, the denial cannot be successful: it relies on a paradox where the criterion whose importance they seek to deny is essential for the denial itself to be successful. To deny this conclusion is a logical contradiction and should be rejected. It is dialectically necessary that an agent must accept that all other agents are capable of making equally valid claim-rights against non-consensual interference with their GCAs, for no other reason than the fact that they are an agent. If the claims made by all agents are equally valid, then all agents are bound to respect the claims of all other agents in order to maintain the validity of their own claim. The argument therefore creates a prescriptive normative obligation restricting the permissible behaviour of all agents to that which does not interfere with the rights of other agents without their consent. It is at this final stage of the argument, through becoming other-regarding, that the prudential ‘ought’ contained in previous stages of the argument becomes a prescriptive moral ‘ought’. The PGC can therefore be summarised as follows: ‘Act in accord with the generic rights of your recipients as of yourself.’ This statement provides a universally applicable test for the moral permissibility of all actions, regardless of the subjective preferences of the agent.