ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors aim to pull the three concepts of choice, rights and responsibility together as a necessary prelude to an understanding of the role housing has. This can be seen as an attempt to ground a universal theory of the role of housing, but also as a plea for the private role of housing as distinct from seeing it purely as a public entity. Bringing the three concepts together the authors concentrate on what it actually means to exercise individual autonomy. One of the keys to understanding how autonomous individuals can live together is how responsibility and choice operate on, and limit, each other. The authors wish to bring together and develop two statements made above. Firstly, that as rights depend on responsibilities they cannot exercise rights in a social vacuum. Secondly, their choices, and hence their rights, are constrained in order to ensure that others may exercise their rights.
