Kimberley Brownlee (University of British Columbia) and Zofia Stemplowska (Worcester College, Oxford): 'Beyond Negative and Positive Rights'
Abstract: At first glance, our rights seem to fall neatly into one of two categories - negative rights and positive rights - with the former being our rights against harm, undue constraint, or disrespect and the latter being our rights to resources and assistance. This neat conceptual division supports an equally neat characterisation of correlative duties such that our negative rights correlate with only negative duties for other people not to interfere with us, and our positive rights correlate with only positive duties for others to assist us. In many accounts, these tidy conceptual moves underpin a normative prioritisation, whereby negative rights and their correlative duties take priority over positive rights and their duties. Upon closer inspection, however, both the conceptual terrain of rights and duties and the normative implications that flow from that terrain elude this kind of neat, dichotomous reasoning. Neither rights nor the duties they justify are well-described by a tidy negative / positive distinction, and the conceptual complexity of rights and duties is matched by normative complexity. A credible story about the most stringent rights is both context-sensitive and agent-sensitive in ways the distinction cannot track. That story is necessarily pluralistic, if not particularist.
Workshop in Moral Philosophy Convenor: David Owens
