Abstract

Rights are powerful moral resources, providing freedom from oppression and cruelty, as well as enabling us to pursue our conceptions of the good. I investigate the connection between rights and equality, addressing the extent to which embracing a rights framework can help us to promote the right of persons to be treated as equals. ;I argue in chapter one that a fundamental right to equality is grounded in our view of persons as inherently dignified and inviolable. This right, to treatment as equals, grounds a more formal right to equality, the right to similar treatment insofar as one is similarly situated. My question is how well rights serve our commitment to equality so understood. ;In chapter two I defend rights against three important challenges I call the "fixity" "perceptual myopia", and "indeterminism" objections. I argue that rights are revisable, not fixed; that honoring them requires attunement to context incompatible with perceptual myopia; and that the specification of rights renders them determinate rather than indeterminate. ;In chapter three I articulate and address two crucial challenges: the problem of false neutrality and the dilemma of difference, each of which limits how well rights serve equality. Promoting and protecting equality, which formally requires that we treat similar cases similarly, requires that we be able to identify what differences are relevant among cases, and what the relevance of those differences is. By attaching normative weight to the assignment of differences, false neutrality makes equality difficult to achieve. Further, it creates a background against which either recognizing or ignoring differences can hinder individuals because of the normative weight of those differences. False neutrality is a vexing problem for rights, and the best we can hope for, in pursuing equality, is to minimize it. ;Minimizing this problem will, as I argue in chapter four, require that rights be supplemented. By imaginatively reconstructing the perspective of another, and by raising our deliberations to the level of communal discussion, we can avoid false neutrality, exposing the unstated norms and hidden biases that load assignments of difference and make equality difficult to achieve