A theory of moral rights

Patricia Werhane

pp. 27-47

in: David Bevan, Regina W. Wolfe (eds), Systems thinking and moral imagination, Berlin, Springer, 2019

Abstrakt

Despite her fairly rigorous anti-foundationalist stance in her writings on Wittgenstein, in another of her early works, Persons, Rights and Corporations (Werhane 1985), a selection of which is reproduced in this chapter, Werhane endorses a foundational point of view by arguing that human beings, just because they are human, have basic inalienable rights, which cannot be abrogated despite what is often one's own best intentions. She adopts this acutely Lockean position with regard to a theory of rights not only to defend what she finds the critically important idea that all human beings, just because they are human, have "basic rights," but also, in order that she may defend the rights of employees against various common law principles, such as the widespread American practice of employment-at-will.Original publication: Excerpt from "Introduction," in Werhane, Patricia H. Persons, Rights, and Corporations. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall. 1985, pp. 4–26. ©1985 Reprinted with permission.

Cited authors

Wittgenstein Ludwig