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Towards a More Particularist View of Rights’ Stringency

Rumbold, B; (2019) Towards a More Particularist View of Rights’ Stringency. Res Publica , 25 pp. 211-233. 10.1007/s11158-018-9396-3. Green open access

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Abstract

For all their various disagreements, one point upon which rights theorists often agree is that it is simply part of the nature of rights that they tend to override, outweigh or exclude competing considerations in moral reasoning, that they have ‘peremptory force’ (Raz in The Morality of Freedom, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986, p. 192), making ‘powerful demands’ that can only be overridden in ‘exceptional circumstances’ (Miller, in Cruft, Liao, Renzo (eds), Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016, p. 240). In this article I challenge this thought. My aim here is not to prove that the traditional view of rights’ stringency is necessarily false, nor even that we have no good reason to believe it is true. Rather, my aim is only to show that we have good reason to think that the foundation of the traditional position is less stable than we might have otherwise supposed and that an alternative conception of rights—one which takes the stringency of any given right as particular to the kind of right it is—is both viable and attractive. In short, to begin to move us towards a more ‘particularist’ conception of rights’ standing in moral reasoning and judgement.

Type: Article
Title: Towards a More Particularist View of Rights’ Stringency
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1007/s11158-018-9396-3
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11158-018-9396-3
Language: English
Additional information: © The Author(s) 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Keywords: Rights; Stringency; Trumps; Particularism; Dworkin; Raz; Nozick
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10045770
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