ABSTRACT
This essay argues that the question of the value of Hegelian rights can be answered only if we attend to the difference between status claims and equivalence claims. Hegel’s conception of rights ranges from abstract rights of personhood to moral rights of welfare to the more specific rights that one has as a family member, worker, and citizen. These are statuses that are secured through mutual recognition, the normative intersubjectivity that has received much attention in the recent literature. The essay argues that equivalence claims are the way in which rights expand beyond the negative claims that protect an individual’s status. When rights are determinately expressed in action, the person must be able to claim a value for their exercise of right that is equivalent to the value of the same activity by another. Without a social order that sustains faith in equitable contexts of value, the insistence on right is self-defeating because the conditions for the expression of rights are nullified.
