An Essay on Rights

This work addresses the question: what is justice? - and answers it in the formulation of a series of rights that are reasonable in themselves and consistent with each other. All people have equal rights to the fruits of the earth, and all people have an equal right to freedom. The tensions between these propositions have both exercised the minds of philosophers, moralists, economists, jurists and others, and informed ideological conflict, wars and revolutions. How they are interpreted in law, politics and society crucially affects relations between individuals, societies and generations. Hillel Steiner seeks their resolution in a set of rights that is at once libertarian and redistributive in its outcome. The argument opens with considerations of the meaning of liberty and of the nature of rights. In subsequent chapters the author examines the roles played by these ideas in moral, economic and legal reasoning. He then draws together the argument in the construction of a system of "original" rights in relation to property, to the body (including problems raised by genetic engineering), to time and to place.
The book should appeal to a wide range of readers concerned with the problems and outcomes of legal, moral and economic theory, with the history of ideas and with the philosophy of law, social science and social policy. The argument is at times necessarily technical. It is illustrated throughout with real and hypothetical examples.