Abstract

In THE NATURE OF RIGHTS I critically evaluate several important approaches to the analysis of rights, and present and defend my own theory of their nature. I argue that all rights involve claim-rights, and suggest an analysis of claim-rights in terms of owed obligation. ;I present and evaluate several theories of the nature of rights, including: theories of rights as protections of freedoms, theories of rights as protections of interests, theories, in particular that of Joel Feinberg, which characterize rights as claims of some sort, Ronald Dworkin's recent account of rights as political concerns or trumps, and Theodore Benditt's polar opposite view that rights are not concerns at all, but that they are cited merely to summarize the conclusions of legal and moral reasoning. I argue that these approaches are problematical. ;My own theory of the nature of rights emerges from an investigation of the relations which generally hold between rights and obligations. I discuss a number of attempts to analyze rights in terms of obligation. They fail. I suggest that, rather than attempting to analyze rights in terms of obligation, simpliciter, we should concentrate on the more hopeful project of analyzing them in terms of owed obligation . I discuss the nature of owed obligations, including their structural and logical characteristics. I argue that rights can be correlated to owed obligations, propose several such correlations, and defend this against recently proposed counterexamples to such correlativity. I develop out of these correlations an analyses of rights in terms of owed obligation