Abstract

The literature on rights in both moral and legal philosophy is voluminous, so voluminous that there may seem to be little justification for one more symposium to swell its ranks. But the discussion of rights has been fairly tightly organized around several narrow topics of debate, among them whether rights should be explained in terms of interests or choices, 1 whether rights are strictly correlative with duties, 2 and the relation between rights and utility. 3 The inspiration for the present symposium is the sense that one topic of central importance has generally been given short shrift: the question of whether rights can conflict. There is, of course, a perfectly good explanation for why this topic has received so little attention; namely that contemporary rights theorists have generally assumed that rights cannot conflict. 4 But this assumption seems to be out of keeping with the way people commonly speak about rights as well as the way in which rights are usually understood in our constitutional tradition