The Realm of Rights

“Thomson offers a painstaking analysis of rights… [She] then works from…the right to bodily integrity…to establish the contours of rights to liberty, rights arising out of promises, and more general property rights… This is a wonderful, deep, and engaging book. It surely deserves to become, as it surely will become, the origin of much more important discussion of ideas about rights.”—Mark Tushnet, Review of Politics

“This book isn’t only about rights; it is also about thinking about rights. Thomson works her way through to a comprehensive account of what our rights are (and aren’t: she is wonderfully resistant to rights extravaganzas). She also shows us, with elegance and wit, how to do this sort of work: what a philosophical argument is, how one shapes an argument and makes it stick, and why the enterprise is so engaging.”—Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

“A great book. It offers a sustained account of rights and will be the standard work on rights. Thomson’s book is more straightforward and much less speculative than, for example, Rawls or Dworkin. Thomson has a very distinctive, attractive voice. The text has a real personality. This is where future work on rights must start.”—Gilbert Harman, Princeton University

“What I like most about this work is Thomson’s faithfulness to nuance and detail in aid of clarifying what can accurately be said about her cases at the most general level. In this connection, her discussions of the relation between compensation and the residue of rights, the question of the ‘absoluteness’ of rights, and alleged moral dilemmas are especially good examples of how she cuts through the many confusions that have surrounded these topics by razor-sharp treatment of cases.”—Stephen L. Darwall, University of Michigan

“The book presents and defends a systematic normative ethical theory built on the structure of a rights theory. Thomson is at home in these subjects, and her discussion here is masterful. She has few equals at the deft and imaginative manipulation of generalizations and counterexamples.”—Joel Feinberg, University of Arizona