{"title":"Rights, Wronging, and Equality of Status","authors":"Giulio Fornaroli","doi":"10.1007/s10982-024-09506-3","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Two problems about rights have received so far little attention. One is the problem of identifying a general value in the practice of rights. The second is to see when, if at all, rights violations wrong the right-holder, in a morally significant sense. In the present essay, I address the first question by investigating the second. I first show that if we commit to the two ideas, common in the contemporary philosophy of rights, that claim-rights always correlate with directed duties and that rights aspire to protect interests of the right-holder, we make it hard to explain why rights violations, in general, wrong right-holders. In the final section, I present what I see as a promising solution to the puzzle. I describe a particular social environment (the society of equals) where interacting with others through rights is indeed valuable because respecting rights communicates that one takes seriously others’ equal moral status. In such a society and only in such a society, I conclude, moral agents are required to treat all rights violations as wrongs perpetrated against the right-holder.</p>","PeriodicalId":51702,"journal":{"name":"Law and Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8000,"publicationDate":"2024-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Law and Philosophy","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-024-09506-3","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"ETHICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Two problems about rights have received so far little attention. One is the problem of identifying a general value in the practice of rights. The second is to see when, if at all, rights violations wrong the right-holder, in a morally significant sense. In the present essay, I address the first question by investigating the second. I first show that if we commit to the two ideas, common in the contemporary philosophy of rights, that claim-rights always correlate with directed duties and that rights aspire to protect interests of the right-holder, we make it hard to explain why rights violations, in general, wrong right-holders. In the final section, I present what I see as a promising solution to the puzzle. I describe a particular social environment (the society of equals) where interacting with others through rights is indeed valuable because respecting rights communicates that one takes seriously others’ equal moral status. In such a society and only in such a society, I conclude, moral agents are required to treat all rights violations as wrongs perpetrated against the right-holder.
期刊介绍:
Law and Philosophy is a forum for the publication of work in law and philosophy which is of common interest to members of the two disciplines of jurisprudence and legal philosophy. It is open to all approaches in both fields and to work in any of the major legal traditions - common law, civil law, or the socialist tradition. The editors of Law and Philosophy encourage papers which exhibit philosophical reflection on the law informed by a knowledge of the law, and legal analysis informed by philosophical methods and principles.