Moral Rights and Their Grounds offers a novel theory of rights based on two distinct views. The first—the value view of rights—argues that for a person to have a right is to be valuable in a certain way, or to have a value property. This special type of value is in turn identified by the reasons that others have for treating the right holder in certain ways, and that correlate with the value in question. David Alm then argues that the familiar agency view of rights should be replaced with a different version according to which persons’ rights, and thus at least in part their value, are based on their actions rather than their mere agency. This view, which Alm calls exercise-based rights, retains some of the most valuable features of the agency view while also defending it against common objections concerning right loss. This book presents a unique conception of exercise-based rights that will be of keen interest to ethicists, legal philosophers, and political philosophers interested in rights theory.

Moral Ground brings together the testimony of over eighty visionaries—theologians and religious leaders, scientists, elected officials, business leaders, naturalists, activists, and writers—to present a diverse and compelling call to honor our individual and collective moral responsibility to our planet. In the face of environmental degradation and global climate change, scientific knowledge alone does not tell us what we ought to do. The missing premise of the argument and much-needed center piece in the debate to date has been the need for ethical values, moral guidance, and principled reasons for doing the right thing for our planet, its animals, its plants, and its people. Contributors from throughout the world (including North America, Africa, Australia, Asia, and Europe) bring forth a rich variety of heritages and perspectives. Their contributions take many forms, illustrating the rich variety of ways we express our moral beliefs in letters, poems, economic analyses, proclamations, essays, and stories. In the end, their voices affirm why we must move beyond a scientific study and response to embrace an ongoing model of repair and sustainability. These writings demonstrate that scientific analysis and moral conviction can work successfully side-by-side. This is a book that can speak to anyone, regardless of his or her worldview, and that also includes a section devoted to “what next” thinking that helps the reader put the words and ideas into action in their personal lives. Thanks to generous support from numerous landmark organizations, such as the Kendeda Fund and Germeshausen Foundation, the book is just the starting point for a national, and international, discussion that will be carried out in a variety of ways, from online debate to “town hall” meetings, from essay competitions for youth to sermons from pulpits in all denominations. The “Moral Ground movement” will result in a newly discovered, or rediscovered, commitment on a personal and community level to consensus about our ethical obligation to the future. Contributors include: Fred W. Allendorf, Bartholomew I, Mary Catherine Bateson, Thomas Berry, Wendell Berry, Marcus J. Borg, J. Baird Callicott, Courtney S. Campbell, F. Stuart Chapin III, Robin Morris Collin, Michael M. Crow, Dalai Lama, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Brian Doyle, David James Duncan, Massoumeh Ebtekar, Jesse M. Fink, Dave Foreman, Thomas L. Friedman, James Garvey, Thich Nhat Hanh, Paul Hawken, Bernd Heinrich, Linda Hogan, bell hooks, Dale Jamieson, Derrick Jensen, John Paul II, Martin S. Kaplan, Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley, Stephen R. Kellert, Robin W. Kimmerer, Barbara Kingsolver, Shepard Krech III, Ursula K. Le Guin, Hank Lentfer, Carly Lettero, Oren Lyons, Wangari Maathai, Sallie McFague, Bill McKibben, Katie McShane, Curt Meine, Ming Xu, N. Scott Momaday, Kathleen Dean Moore, Hylton Murray-Philipson, Gary Paul Nabhan, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Michael P. Nelson, Barack Obama, Ernest Partridge, John Perry, Edwin P. Pister, Carl Pope, Robert Michael Pyle, David Quammen, Daniel Quinn, Kate Rawles, Tri Robinson, Libby Roderick, Holmes Rolston III, Deborah Bird Rose, Jonathan F. P. Rose, Carl Safina, Scott Russell Sanders, Lauret Savoy, Nirmal Selvamony, Ismail Serageldin, Peter Singer, Sulak Sivaraksa, Gary Snyder, James Gustave Speth, Brian Swimme, Bron Taylor, Paul B. Thompson, George Tinker, Joerg Chet Tremmel, Quincy Troupe, Mary Evelyn Tucker, José Galizia Tundisi, Brian Turner, Desmond Tutu, Steve Vanderheiden, John A. Vucetich, Kimberly A. Wade-Benzoni, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Alan Weisman, Terry Tempest Williams, E. O. Wilson, and Xin Wei.

Seeking a way out of today's bewildering rush of rights claims, Tara Smith's Moral Rights and Political Freedom offers a systematic account of the nature and foundations of rights. The book carefully elucidates what political freedom is and demonstrates why it should be protected by rights. Smith's thesis is that rights are teleological: respect for freedom is necessary for individuals' flourishing or eudaimonia. Smith illustrates how many alleged rights would actually undermine that objective. Her decisive refutation of the assumption that conflicts between rights are inevitable—demonstrating how such conflicts are theoretically incoherent and practically self-defeating—should go a long way toward resolving many contemporary disputes about rights.

Edited by Mylan Engel Jr. and Gary Lynn Comstock, this book employs different ethical lenses, including classical deontology, libertarianism, commonsense morality, virtue ethics, utilitarianism, and the capabilities approach, to explore the philosophical basis for the strong animal rights view, which holds that animals have moral rights equal in strength to the rights of humans, while also addressing what are undoubtedly the most serious challenges to the strong animal rights stance, including the challenges posed by rights nihilism, the “kind” argument against animal rights, the problem of predation, and the comparative value of lives. In addition, contributors explore the practical import of animal rights both from a social policy standpoint and from the standpoint of personal ethical decisions concerning what to eat and whether to hunt animals. Unlike other volumes on animal rights, which focus primarily on the legal rights of animals, and unlike other anthologies on animal ethics, which tend to cover a wide variety of topics but only devote a few articles to each topic, this volume focuses exclusively on the question of whether animals have moral rights and the practical import of such rights. The Moral Rights of Animals will be an indispensable resource for scholars, teachers, and students in the fields of animal ethics, applied ethics, ethical theory, and human-animal studies, as well as animal rights advocates and policy makers interested in improving the treatment of animals.

'Art and Authority' explores the sources, nature, and limits of artistic freedom. The author draws upon real-world cases and controversies in contemporary visual art to offer a better understanding of artistic authorship and authority. Each chapter focuses on a case of dispute over the rights of an artist with respect to his or her artwork.

What is a human right? How can we tell whether a proposed human right really is one? How do we establish the content of particular human rights, and how do we resolve conflicts between them? These are pressing questions for philosophers, political theorists, jurisprudents, international lawyers, and activists. James Griffin offers answers in his compelling new investigation of the foundations of human rights. First, On Human Rights traces the idea of a natural right from its origin in the late Middle Ages, when the rights were seen as deriving from natural laws, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the original theological background was progressively dropped and 'natural law' emptied of most of its original meaning. By the end of the Enlightenment, the term 'human rights' (droits de l'homme) appeared, marking the purge of the theological background. But the Enlightenment, in putting nothing in its place, left us with an unsatisfactory, incomplete idea of a human right. Griffin shows how the language of human rights has become debased. There are scarcely any accepted criteria, either in the academic or the public sphere, for correct use of the term. He takes on the task of showing the way towards a determinate concept of human rights, based on their relation to the human status that we all share. He works from certain paradigm cases, such as freedom of expression and freedom of worship, to more disputed cases such as welfare rights - for instance the idea of a human right to health. His goal is a substantive account of human rights - an account with enough content to tell us whether proposed rights really are rights. Griffin emphasizes the practical as well as theoretical urgency of this goal: as the United Nations recognized in 1948 with its Universal Declaration, the idea of human rights has considerable power to improve the lot of humanity around the world. We can't do without the idea of human rights, and we need to get clear about it. It is our job now - the job of this book - to influence and develop the unsettled discourse of human rights so as to complete the incomplete idea.

An Approach to Rights contains fifteen previously published but mostly inaccessible papers that together show the development of one of the more important contemporary theories of the nature, grounds and practical implications of rights. In a long retrospective essay, Carl Wellman explains what he was trying to accomplish in each paper, how far he believes that he succeeded and where he failed. Thus the author provides a critical perspective both on his own theory and on alternative theories from which he borrows, or that he rejects. These essays identify the problems any adequate theory of rights must solve, describe the more plausible solutions and weigh the merits of each. They will be of special interest to any reader concerned with legal theory, moral philosophy or any branch of applied ethics or social policy in which appeals to rights are frequently made but seldom rationally satisfactory.