Rights: Concepts and Contexts contains the central works of recent scholarship on the nature of rights, with contributions by some of the most prominent contemporary theorists in moral, legal, and political philosophy, including Joseph Raz, Robert Alexy, Jeremy Waldron, Morton Horwitz, Stephen Darwall, Margaret Gilbert, David Lyons, and Aharon Barak. With approaches ranging from the political to the historical, and from the analytical to the critical, this collection touches on the major conceptual and practical questions of this important field: what is the nature and grounding of human rights? How should conflicts of rights best be analyzed? Are rights best understood in terms of choice, benefits, or some hybrid of the two? What are the connections between rights and duties, and between rights and justice? The collection also offers useful introductions to emerging issues in rights theory such as the purported bipolarity of rights.

Moral and political theorists who espouse Egalitarianism and Marxism tend to assume that it is extremely hard, if not impossible, to put forward an original and plausible moral justification of classical liberalism. Professor Spector is concerned to build just such a justification. He reconstructs and then criticizes a familiar approach to the moral foundations of classical liberalism which rests on the maximization of negative freedom, and then frames an alternative theory centered in the obligation to protect positive freedom. In doing so he parts company not only with utilitarianism and contractarianism, but also with the theory of natural rights. Among the topics he discusses are the concepts of negative and positive freedom, the notion of a moral right, the connection between positive freedom and personal autonomy, the axiological uniqueness of each human being, and the agent-relativity of moral reasons.

Rights: Concepts and Contexts contains the central works of recent scholarship on the nature of rights, with contributions by some of the most prominent contemporary theorists in moral, legal, and political philosophy, including Joseph Raz, Robert Alexy, Jeremy Waldron, Morton Horwitz, Stephen Darwall, Margaret Gilbert, David Lyons, and Aharon Barak. With approaches ranging from the political to the historical, and from the analytical to the critical, this collection touches on the major conceptual and practical questions of this important field: what is the nature and grounding of human rights? How should conflicts of rights best be analyzed? Are rights best understood in terms of choice, benefits, or some hybrid of the two? What are the connections between rights and duties, and between rights and justice? The collection also offers useful introductions to emerging issues in rights theory such as the purported bipolarity of rights.