What’s Wrong with Rights? By Nigel Biggar

Nigel Biggar believes that rights-talk has got out of hand. Rights-fundamentalism has become ‘a secularised version of biblical religion’ (328), combining ‘an admirable commitment to the cause of the disadvantaged and the injured’ with ‘an impatient, utopian rigidity that refuses to compromise with facts, acknowledge the inevitability of risk, and reckon with tragedy’ (329). His book asks a series of questions about rights but, and this makes it a difficult book to review, is not ‘the systematic presentation of a fully worked out theory of rights’ (3) or even ‘orientated towards answering a single, focal question’ (4). What emerges from Biggar’s reflections is an argument that rights-talk is best regarded as a feature of litigation rather than a key component of natural morality, and that rights should be carefully qualified and circumscribed rather than treated as overriding most countervailing considerations. Biggar spends the first five chapters asking: are there natural...

Argument (complex analysis) · Compromise · Disadvantaged · Fundamentalism · Law and economics · Morality · Natural (archaeology) · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Tragedy (event) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Religious Freedom and Discrimination