Colloquium: March 12

Date/Time:  Friday, March 12th at 2:30pm via Zoom

Speaker: Japa Pallikkathayil, University of Pittsburgh

Title: What May I Use? 

Abstract:

Despite the ubiquity of talk about rights in philosophical, legal, and policy discussions, there is little agreement about what rights are.  In this paper, I give a novel account of what a right is, though one that I hope will strike you as intuitive once it has been elaborated.  But a word of caution about this aim is in order.  Our usage of the word ‘right’ is beholden to a long and messy history.  It may well be that there is no way of glossing what a right is that will capture all plausible uses of that term.  What I hope to do is to illuminate a foundational aspect of the normative landscape, one that I think can be helpfully associated with the term ‘right’.  To put my view succinctly, I hold that rights enable us to answer a series of questions beginning with the question “What may I use?”  I will count my argument as successful if it convinces you that these questions and their answers play an important role in structuring our normative thinking even if by end of my argument some still prefer to reserve the term ‘right’ for something else.