Rights: Why do they matter, and to whom?

Robert Sugden

Constitutional Political Economy, 1993, vol. 4, issue 1, 127-152

Abstract: Following Sen, social choice theorists often formulate rights in terms of relationships between individuals' preferences and social preferences. An alternative “procedural” formulation treats rights as properties of game forms. This paper reviews the debate between the proponents of these two approaches, focusing in particular on Sen's claim that the procedural approach is inflexible in its refusal to make trade-offs between rights violations. It looks at different answers to the question, “Why do rights matter?” It argues that, if a contractarian answer is given, there are good reasons not to make trade-offs. Copyright George Mason University 1993

Date: 1993
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/BF02393285 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:copoec:v:4:y:1993:i:1:p:127-152

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10602/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/BF02393285

Access Statistics for this article

Constitutional Political Economy is currently edited by Roger Congleton and Stefan Voigt

More articles in Constitutional Political Economy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().