Rights and Interests Revisited

Chapter 5 takes up four questions about the relation between rights, interests, and desires raised by Chapter 2. It explains why—given Chapter 4’s ‘Addressive’ analysis—we can create rights wherever we want through law or convention, independently of the right-holder’s interests or desires. It also sketches the idea (taken up at greater length in Chapter 7) that pre-conventional ‘natural’ rights must be grounded in the right-holder’s own good. The chapter goes on to explain why all rights create a status desire or interest in their own fulfilment, and it ends by explaining why the vast majority of morally justified rights, including legally and conventionally created rights, necessarily serve their holders’ independent interests or desires—that is, why Kramer’s and Wenar’s accounts are very nearly correct.