Rights and Demands Conference

Rights and Demands Book Cover Image

February 8-9, 2019
Humanities Gateway 1030
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What are rights? How do they relate to duties, powers, and interests that ought to be protected? What normative work is done by calling something a right? Could morality or law provide the basis of genuine rights, and if not, what does?

These and related questions – vigorously debated by moral philosophers and legal theorists for decades – are taken up in a much-anticipated book by UCI Distinguished Professor Margaret Gilbert, Rights and Demands: A Foundational Inquiry (OUP 2018). Professor Gilbert advances her own account of what she calls "demand-rights," arguably the central case of rights, an account that she grounds in the social phenomenon of joint commitment. The view serves not only as a novel alternative to leading theories of rights, but as a challenge to widely held views about the scope of morality, the nature of obligation and the existence of a whole class of phenomena that go by the name “rights.”

At the conference, prominent theorists of ethics and jurisprudence engage with this provocative account and its wide-ranging implications, addressing some fundamental questions for ethics and rights theory going forward.

    Featured Speakers Include

  • Richard Arneson

    Distinguished Professor and Valtz Family Chair in Philosophy
    University of California, San Diego
  • Allen E. Buchanan

    Research Professor
    University of Arizona
  • Stephen Darwall

    Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy
    Yale University
  • Frances Kamm

    Distinguished Professor
    Henry Rutgers University Professor of Philosophy
    Rutgers University
  • Gregory Keating

    William T. Dalessi Professor of Law and Philosophy
    University of Southern California
  • Gary Watson

    Provost Professor of Philosophy and Law
    University of Southern California

Contact

Rabie Kadri
Law Centers Manager
centers@law.uci.edu
(949) 824-2370