Women's Rights: Whose Obligations?

Abstract

The rhetoric of rights is not only deceptively easy to promulgate, but deeply evasive. Most of the difficulty of thinking about women's rights grows out of this general evasiveness of thought about rights. Talking of rights and of obligations are both ways of talking about action, not about items that can be possessed. The rhetoric of rights supposedly appeals to fundamental moral principles, and aspires to justify or to condemn institutional and positive rights, and indeed to justify or to condemn the claims of the grand Declarations and Charters, so cannot coherently presuppose them. Libertarian advocates of rights insist also that universal claim rights must be liberty rights, and that universal rights to goods or services, hence to welfare, are incoherent.