Angelic, brute, or responsible rights?

The specification of legal rights in the Analytical Theory has been characterized by sobriety and rigor and such a lesson has become of great significance in contemporary normative debate on justice and fairness. In this paper I will primarily mention Hohfeld’s table of correlatives and Ross’s variation of it (1), secondly, two competing theories of rights: on the one hand, the ‘choice theory’ of rights in the version defended by Hart (2) and, on the other hand the ‘interest theory’ supported by MacCormick (3). Far from engaging in reasoning about the nature or the foundation of rights, the present paper identifies potential weaknesses in these accounts since, from one hand they do not suitably help us to understand what is truly in jeopardy in the debate over the issue and on the other hand they do not take stock of a philosophical justification of the genesis of the “new” human rights (4). The attempt of achieving an understanding of rights as responsible rights, neither as angelic outcomes of positivity nor as brute interests, is via the concept of the person. Within a normative praxis, persons partake and construct reasons so that freedom takes shape sub nomine of responsibility. In a nutshell, I refer to the Aristotelian normative praxis – at length interpreted by José de Sousa e Brito – as the place where deciding is to be justified in view of “all possible ends” and humans take the responsibility for it .