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An Essay on Rights

Hillel Steiner

Analytic libertarianism

It earns its place as a rigorous attempt to ground libertarian rights on analytic foundations while accommodating equality.

Synopsis

An analytic philosophical defense of a left-libertarian theory in which equal natural rights are reconciled with claims to natural resources.

Core passage idea

Paraphrase · Modern copyrighted work

A coherent system of rights must be compossible, so that every person's rights can be jointly exercised without contradiction.

It makes logical consistency the test of any rights theory, showing freedom and equality can be combined if rights are carefully bounded.

To avoid a bubble

Pair with Sovereign Virtue.

Reading note

Read it slowly as tight analytic philosophy, attending to its precise definitions of rights, liberty, and compossibility.

Best paired with

Sovereign Virtue

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