ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to show that the agency view can account for those moral properties often attributed to rights in the literature. In particular, it is shown how to account for the idea that rights trump other considerations, how they are associated with so-called deontological restrictions, and why rights are resistant to aggregation. Heavy use is made here of the idea that a right involves control, understood in terms of exclusionary reasons, over a certain domain. The chapter also introduces a suggestion, to be explored further elsewhere, about how to explain why these familiar features are not absolute (e.g., why rights do not trump all other considerations).
