The concept of a right is fundamental to moral, political, and
legal thinking, but much of the use of that concept is selective
and fragmentary: it is common merely to appeal to this or that
intuitively plausible attribution of rights as needed for purposes
of argument. In "The Realm of Rights" Judith Thomson provides a
full-scale, systematic theory of human and social rights, bringing
out what in general makes an attribution of a right true.
Thomson says that the question what it is to have a right
precedes the question which rights we have, and she therefore
begins by asking why our having rights is a morally significant
fact about us. She argues that a person's having a right is
reducible to a complex moral constraint: central to that constraint
is that, other things being equal, the right ought to be accorded.
Thomson asks what those other things are that may or may not be
equal, and describes the tradeoffs that relieve us of the
requirement to accord a right.
Our rights fall into two classes, those we have by virtue of
being human beings and those we have by virtue of private
interactions and law. Thomson argues that the first class includes
rights that others not kill or harm us, but does not include rights
that others meet our needs. The second class includes rights that
issue from promises and consent, and Thomson shows how they are
generated; she also argues that property rights issue only from a
legitimate legal system, so that the second class includes them as
well.
"The Realm of Rights" will take its place as a major effort to
provide a stable foundation for our deeply held belief that we are
not mere cogs in a communal machine, but are instead
individualswhose private interests are entitled to respect.
General
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