A Holistic Approach to Rights

Book excerpt: Applying new theories about rights to pressing social issues, A Holistic Approach to Rights suggests major changes are needed in the ways we think about rights and formulating social policy. Part I analyzes rights as networks of warrants--socially recognized sanctions for doing, saying, demanding, believing, feeling, or thinking something as one's due. On this account, rights are more varied and play a more diverse and open-ended role in legal and moral thinking than most theories of rights allow. A new theory of natural rights treats them as claims that every person has upon the state, as a condition of legitimacy, to make adequate provision for those features of human life that require force against persons to be justified. Moral rights, such as the right to the truth, derive from team loyalty due fellow members of the moral community and can be lost by someone who acts in ways that undermine the moral enterprise. Part II provides detailed analyses of affirmative action, group rights, the rights of future generations, reproductive rights, the use of new reproductive technologies, and speech rights. Specific conclusions include an innovative proposal for regulating violence and pornography in the media.