ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the conceptual apparatus, basically Hohfeldian, to be employed in the book, and offers a rough initial statement of the value view in terms of that apparatus, at first as a view about Hohfeldian claims rather than rights, where such a claim is understood as the central element of a right. The value view is put forth as a thesis (i) about moral rights/claims rather than legal ones, (ii) about general rights/claims, rather than particular ones, and (iii) about basic rights/claims rather than derived ones. Framed in terms of claims it says the following: A basic general claim is a special kind of value belonging to the claim holder and any obligation corresponding to that general claim is a special kind of reason for the obligation bearer to act.
The chapter then describes the conception of value used in stating the value view. A “value” here means a value property. The type of value property figuring in the value view is (i) objective, (ii) non-derivative, and (iii) identified by reference to the special reasons with which it is associated.
It is then shown that, given the value view, (i) obligations and particular claims are correlated in the sense of being logically equivalent, and (ii) general claims are prior to particular claims and obligations. In the process, obligations, which are moral relations holding between two parties, are distinguished from duties, which are non-relational and stand for what one morally ought to do all things considered.
