![]() |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Rent Your Textbooks
Save up to 70% when you rent your textbooks on Amazon. Keep your textbook rentals for a semester and rental return shipping is free. |
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
The curious nature of American rights talk has led an increasing number of people to reject the existence of rights altogether. Rights have, of late, come under serious sustained attack from a variety of quaters, and it's hard not to feel a little sympathy with such critiques. Talk to a guy who thinks you have an absolute sui generis right to own a sub-machine gun a few times, and you will begin to understand why Bentham called rights "nonsense on stilts." Still, rights, and rights talk, lay at the heart of our republic, as well as of the recent attempts to hold foreign dictators to universal moral standards. It would be most unfortunant if a concept that has done so much good in the world turned out to be incoherent.
According to Glendon's book, the problem it not with rights themselves, but with what she calls the "American rights dialect," the particular way in which we speak of rights here and now.
... Read more ›