Short description
This volume engages in a debate over the fundamental characteristics of legal and moral rights. It addresses many questions including: what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a right? And what is the connection between the existence and the enforcement of a right?
Long description
The authors of this volume engage in essay form in a lively debate over the fundamental characteristics of legal and moral rights. Each author considers whether rights essentially protect individuals' interests or whether they instead essentially enable individuals to make choices. The book addresses many questions including: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a right? What is the connection between the existence and the enforcement of a right (i.e., between rights and remedies)? Does the identification of rights inevitably involve value judgements? To what extent can rights be in conflict? The answers to these and related questions can illuminatingly clarify, though not finally resolve, some of the present-day controversies over abortion, euthanasia, and animal rights. Anyone interested in the basic nature of rights and other entitlements will profit from reading this book.
Review
.,. all three of the essays are quite well written, and the authors expound their positions with admirable vigor and clarity. This work will certainly be of significant interest to anyone concerned with the Hohfeldian jural framework, the 'Interest' and 'Will' theories of rights, or the rival analytic and evaluative approaches to the philosophical foundations of rights theory. It is, then, a more than welcome addition to our ongoing 'debate over rights'. --The Law and Politics Book Review
Table of contents
- Part Matthew H
- Kramer, rights without trimmings
- setting the Hohfeldian Table
- rights without trimmings
- appendix
- getting Hohfeld right
- Part N
- E
- Simmonds, rights at the cutting edge
- background
- the fundamental issues
- Hohfeld and the fragmentation of rights
- Hohfeld and the Kantians
- the interest theory of rights
- the modern will theory
- Part Hillel Steiner, working rights
- preliminary intuitions about rights
- from Hohfeld to Hart
- the modern will theory
- some apparent problems with the will theory
- from Hart to Kant
- the classical will theory (partly) redeemed
- some real problems with the interest theory