Rights’ Elusive Relation to Powers

Abstract

Chapter 3 examines the relation between rights and the powers typically borne by right-holders: powers to waive duties, demand their fulfilment, enforce them, resent them, forgive them. It argues that there are impersonal parallels, performable by third parties, for all the powers that one might think can only be performed by the person to whom a duty is owed. We therefore cannot identify to whom a duty is owed by asking who can exercise the relevant powers. Instead we need to ask, circularly, who can exercise these powers as right-holder to whom the duty is owed. This reasoning is used to criticize the Will Theory of Rights (as found in Hart and Steiner), and other problems are found with Sreenivasan’s Hybrid Theory and Feinberg’s demand-based approach.