Green's Rights Recognition Thesis and Moral Internalism

Abstract

T. H. Green claimed that ‘rights are made by recognition. There is no right but thinking makes it so’. This ‘rights recognition thesis’ is widely rejected. I argue in this article that, so far from being an idiosyncratic doctrine of 19th-century British Idealism, the rights recognition thesis implies a compelling conception of rights, and one that, surprisingly, is more in tune with contemporary meta-ethics than are many contemporary rights theories. Green's moral theory, I argue, is a form of the widely embraced doctrine of ‘moral internalism’. Such internalism, conjoined with a generally embraced analysis of rights, leads to some version of the rights recognition thesis.