Introduction
Dworkin famously characterizes political rights as trumps, and his explication of this idea is his central contribution to general theorizing about rights. The claim that rights are trumps primarily concerns one question we might ask about the nature of moral rights: what is the practical force of a moral right? Or, slightly differently: what do moral rights accomplish in terms of our reasons for action? Dworkin’s view is that political rights, i.e., the moral rights asserted by individuals against their government in liberal societies, generate distinctive practical requirements that effectively disable otherwise operative justifications for acting. The theory is somewhat narrow, then, in offering an account of the role of rights in a liberal political theory, rather than an analysis of moral and legal rights assertions generally.
Intuitively, the basic idea can be expressed as follows. Suppose we think that utility promotion is typically sufficient grounds to justify...
Notes
- 1.
Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 169–170.
- 2.
Ibid., 193–194.
- 3.
Ibid., 170–177.
- 4.
A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 369–371.
- 5.
Yowell’s careful textual analysis of the evolution of Dworkin’s views shows this clearly. See Paul Yowell, “A Critical Examination of Dworkin’s Theory of Rights,” American Journal of Jurisprudence 52, no. 1 (2007).
- 6.
See, for example, Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously, 191.
- 7.
A Matter of Principle, 361. See also Taking Rights Seriously, 233–234.
- 8.
Taking Rights Seriously, 272–273. Dworkin offers a similar statement of the idea in Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 330.
- 9.
See Taking Rights Seriously, 176.
- 10.
For further discussion, see Justice for Hedgehogs, 191–218, 327–378.
- 11.
See, for instance, Taking Rights Seriously, 190–191.
- 12.
Ibid., 198–200.
- 13.
Ibid., 223–239, 66–78; A Matter of Principle, 335–372.
- 14.
Taking Rights Seriously, 277.
- 15.
Yowell, “A Critical Examination of Dworkin’s Theory of Rights,” 105–106. Yowell concludes that the accounts are, in fact, in tension.
- 16.
For instance, the “rights as reasons” model is affirmed at Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs, 329. The “preference excluding model” is affirmed at Freedom’s Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 101–104.
- 17.
Taking Rights Seriously, xi–xv.
- 18.
Some of Dworkin’s discussion of preference exclusion seems to suppose complex rights by treating certain spheres of activity as prima facie protected from legislative intrusion. See, for example, ibid., 277.
- 19.
Justice for Hedgehogs, 332–339.
- 20.
Ibid., 335–336.
- 21.
Jeremy Waldron, “Introduction,” in Theories of Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 17.
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Reeves, A.R. (2018). Dworkin, Ronald - Theory of Rights. In: Sellers, M., Kirste, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_4-2
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