ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the assumption that frames the most important debates in contemporary moral and political philosophy–the assumption that the concept of a right has certain unique features which make rights so especially valuable as to be virtually indispensable elements of any acceptable social order. There are, it seems, only two archetypal strategies for challenging the thesis that rights are uniquely valuable. The first is to argue that rights are valuable only under certain defective–and temporary–social conditions. Second explore more promising strategy for challenging the thesis that rights are so uniquely valuable as to be indispensable. This second approach frankly acknowledges that at least some of the types of interpersonal conflict which rights are invoked to handle are not eliminable by changing the mode of production or by any other acceptable and feasible transformation of the social order.
