ABSTRACT
In Great Britain and the United States women manifestly have the right to vote. But there was a time, of course, when women did not have the right to vote in the United States, and even now women do not have the right to vote in Kuwait and some other countries. Moral rights, instead of being queer or exotic, were thought to be commonplace, derivative, and trivial. Professor Frey's most interesting suggestion for preserving the intuitive meaningfulness of rights-talk puts him squarely in a tradition that goes back at least to Jeremy Bentham. One can get rid of the mysterious element in moral rights-talk, Frey suggests, by interpreting it as a confused and indirect way of referring to legal rights, which, being plain matters of fact, are not themselves mysterious. Positing moral rights then turns out to be an instance of wishful thinking, and that is what Bentham thinks explains the widespread and persistent belief in them.
