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Rights, Capabilities, And The Good Society, Robin West
Rights, Capabilities, And The Good Society, Robin West
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In Part I this essay explores and then criticizes the two major arguments behind the conventional wisdom that rights undermine efforts to secure a state role in ensuring the material preconditions for a good society, and therefore, the material preconditions for the development of those human capabilities essential to a fully human life. I conclude in this part that this understanding of rights is mistaken. In Part II, I urge that the pragmatic argument put forward by rights critics and some welfare advocates for forgoing rights-talk and rights-rhetoric also fails: there are very real costs, both in theory and in …