Moral Rights and Their Grounds

<p><em>Moral Rights and Their Grounds</em> offers a novel theory of rights based on two distinct views. The first—the <i>value view</i> of rights—argues that for a person to have a right is to be valuable in a certain way or to have a value property. This special type of value is in turn identified by the reasons that others have for treating the right holder in certain ways and that correlate with the value in question. David Alm then argues that the familiar <i>agency view </i>of rights should be replaced with a different version according to which persons’ rights and thus at least in part their value are based on their actions rather than their mere agency. This view which Alm calls <i>exercise-based rights</i> retains some of the most valuable features of the agency view while also defending it against common objections concerning right loss. This book presents a unique conception of exercise-based rights that will be of keen interest to ethicists legal philosophers and political philosophers interested in rights theory.</p>