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The Realm of Rights*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Kurt Baier
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh

Extract

For some 20 years now, Judith Jarvis Thomson has written penetrating, insightful and scrupulously argued essays on controversial issues involving rights. The most important of these were collected and edited by William Parent in a volume entitled Rights, Restitution, and Risk. In an Afterword, reflecting on these essays, she lists a number of things that she felt were lacking from her discussions. Three of them are particularly important: a clear account of what it is to have a right, a clear statement of what rights we have and a clear statement of the role that detailed discussions of controversial cases play in moral theory construction. The volume under review expands and refines her earlier work on rights, and provides a more systematic treatment by, among other things, filling these three gaps. Those familiar with her work will not be disappointed: the new book is as lucid, challenging, illuminating and vigorously argued as her earlier essays, but now affords an overview of the realm of rights, as well as a delineation and location of “the territory of rights” on “the continent of morality” (p. 3).

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1994

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References

Notes

1 Thomson, Judith Jarvis, Rights, Restitution, and Risk, edited by Parent, William (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

2 In Hohfeld, Welsey Newcomb, Fundamental Legal Conceptions, edited by Cook, Walter Wheelen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919).Google Scholar

3 Thomson refers to “Promises and Practices” (p. 303, n. 3) by T. M. Scanlon who has advanced an account similar to hers. See Scanlon, T. M., “Promises and Practices,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 19 (1990): 199226.Google Scholar