ABSTRACT
Rights and liberties are part of the basic structure of society, and should figure prominently in any ethical study of the desirable properties of social arrangements. This is one of the lessons to be drawn from some of the significant contributions to moral philosophy in recent times, as evidenced by the emphasis on personal autonomy in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice and in Stanley Benn’s A Theory of Freedom, and by Serge-Christophe Kolm’s normative discussion of property rights in Le Contrat social liberal. Moreover, rights, liberties and obligations have an intimate connection with the distribution of power in society.
