Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Imagine a world very much like ours, except that nobody has any rights. A world with no rights is not necessarily evil or cruel. People's lives, possessions, and well-being may be well protected in this imagined world, for instance, through the charitable behavior of others, or even through the imposition of sanction-backed duties on others (Feinberg 1970: 243). How would this world be different from ours? Would such a world be (other things being equal) worse or perhaps better than ours? A theory of rights can help in pointing out what, if anything, would be missing in this imagined world.A theory of rights should satisfy two methodological requirements: first, it should be able to accommodate a range of plausible accounts of what rights we have. A theory which identifies as rights only rights advocated by libertarianism or progressive liberalism is thus defective. The question of what rights are should be answered in a way that “illuminates the entire tradition of rights discourse, in which a variety of different theories have offered incompatible views as to what rights there are and why” (Raz 1986: 166). This does not mean that a theory of rights is completely devoid of normative content. It does mean, however, that such a theory must explain the role of rights in different moral and political theories.Secondly, a theory of rights must be attentive to some (or all) of the attributes ... log in or subscribe to read full text