ABSTRACT
In his dense but extraordinarily rich little book Social Philosophy, Joel Feinberg struggled with the broad notion of a right on his way to explicating legal rights and, ultimately, human rights (Feinberg 1973). A right is a kind of claim, he argued, but because not every claim to something is a right to it, only those claims that one justifiably or validly makes are plausible rights. When we are speaking of legal rights, validity is essentially a factual question: Is this right legally recognized? Is there a recognized and authoritative institutional mechanism (e.g. a court) to which one can appeal to enforce one’s rights? Legal rights, in short, are enforceable. But what of moral rights? A person has a moral right, Feinberg asserts, when he or she has a claim, the recognition of which is justified not by legal rules but by moral principles. Human rights are the clearest examples of moral rights, as they purport to be “of a fundamentally important kind held equally by all human beings, unconditionally and unalterably” (Feinberg 1973, 68). That being said, philosophically, it remains an open question whether there are any human rights, and if so, what those rights are and whether any of them are also enforceable legal rights.
