What’s Wrong with Rights?

Product Description

Are natural rights ‘nonsense on stilts’, as Jeremy Bentham memorably put it? Must the very notion of a right be individualistic, subverting the common good? Should the right against torture be absolute, even though the heavens fall? Are human rights universal or merely expressions of Western
neo-imperial arrogance? Are rights ethically fundamental, proudly impervious to changing circumstances? Should judges strive to extend the reach of rights from civil Hamburg to anarchical Basra? Should judicial oligarchies, rather than legislatures, decide controversial ethical issues by inventing
novel rights? Ought human rights advocates learn greater sympathy for the dilemmas facing those burdened with government?

These are the questions that
What’s Wrong with Rights? addresses. In doing so, it draws upon resources in intellectual history, legal philosophy, moral philosophy, moral theology, human rights literature, and the judgments of courts. It ranges from debates about property in medieval
Christendom, through Confucian rights-scepticism, to contemporary discussions about the remedy for global hunger and the justification of killing. And it straddles assisted dying in Canada, the military occupation of Iraq, and genocide in Rwanda.

What’s Wrong with Rights? concludes that much contemporary rights-talk obscures the importance of fostering civic virtue, corrodes military effectiveness, subverts the democratic legitimacy of law, proliferates publicly onerous rights, and undermines their authority and credibility. The
solution to these problems lies in the abandonment of rights-fundamentalism and the recovery of a richer public discourse about ethics, one that includes talk about the duty and virtue of rights-holders.

Review

“I…commend this book for its clarity of reasoning and its engagement with fundamental issues with which we should all be discussing.” — John Duddington,
Law and Justice

“Courageous …
What’s Wrong With Rights? is a rich and challenging book. Not everyone will agree with Biggar’s views, but anyone writing about human rights who wishes to be taken seriously will need to engage with his arguments.” — Jonathan Sumption, The Times

“A brilliant, provocative and intelligent book.” — Simon Heffer, The Daily Telegraph

“A thought-provoking work of scholarship… [a] compelling challenge to sloppy rights-thinking.” — Craig Purshouse, Times Literary Supplement

“This encyclopaedic study provides a marvellous survey of the complex field of rights and raises important questions as to the growing use of rights language.” — R. Dean Drayton,
International Journal of Public Theology

“…A powerfully reasoned intellectual history of the sceptical tradition from the 1780s to the present day. [Biggar is] a discriminating guide rather than an anti-rights ideologist, and his analysis of these traditions is intricate, exacting and fair. While clearly Christian in his perspective, he
keeps claims from authority, especially divine authority, firmly in their place” — Michael Ignatieff, Literary Review

“It is a rigorously reasoned argument and … Biggar succeeds brilliantly in deflating the inordinate claims made for rights today…Along with being a profound study in moral and political philosophy, this is also a devastating and highly topical attack on the belief that ethical dilemmas can be
resolved by ‘an oligarchy of judges’ expanding existing rights and conjuring up new ones…Over the past two decades, Biggar has produced a body of work of the highest intellectual quality which has made him one of the leading living Western ethicists.” — John Gray, New Statesman

“Quietly, cautiously, and with careful scholarly integrity, Professor Biggar has derailed a gravy train. Should the UK withdraw from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights? Should it repeal or redraft the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010? The result would surely be
petitions, denunciations, hostile crow