A Debate Over Rights
This collection of essays forms a lively debate over the fundamental characteristics of legal and moral rights. The essays examine whether rights fundamentally protect individuals' interests or whether they instead fundamentally enable individuals to make choices.
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.
Features
- The three authors of this volume are all well-respected in the field of legal theory and philosophy
- This book is written in the unusual format of a three-way-debate where each author examines and argues with the positions taken by the other two
- This book clarifies and illuminates many contemporary contentious political disputes, and does so in a way that will interest a readership wider than those who are usually interested in legal and political philosophy
Price: £24.99 (Paperback)
0-19-829899-4
Publication date: March 2000