Rights and Demands Conference
February 8-9, 2019
Humanities Gateway 1030
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What are rights? How do they relate to duties, powers, and interests that ought to be protected? What normative work is done by calling something a right? Could morality or law provide the basis of genuine rights, and if not, what does?
These and related questions – vigorously debated by moral philosophers and legal theorists for decades – are taken up in a much-anticipated book by UCI Distinguished Professor Margaret Gilbert, Rights and Demands: A Foundational Inquiry (OUP 2018). Professor Gilbert advances her own account of what she calls "demand-rights," arguably the central case of rights, an account that she grounds in the social phenomenon of joint commitment. The view serves not only as a novel alternative to leading theories of rights, but as a challenge to widely held views about the scope of morality, the nature of obligation and the existence of a whole class of phenomena that go by the name “rights.”
At the conference, prominent theorists of ethics and jurisprudence engage with this provocative account and its wide-ranging implications, addressing some fundamental questions for ethics and rights theory going forward.
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Richard Arneson
Distinguished Professor and Valtz Family Chair in Philosophy
University of California, San Diego -
Allen E. Buchanan
Research Professor
University of Arizona -
Stephen Darwall
Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy
Yale University -
Frances Kamm
Distinguished Professor
Henry Rutgers University Professor of Philosophy
Rutgers University -
Gregory Keating
William T. Dalessi Professor of Law and Philosophy
University of Southern California -
Gary Watson
Provost Professor of Philosophy and Law
University of Southern California