Are rights really so wrong? A response to Nigel Biggar’s <i>What’s Wrong with Rights</i>
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In my response to Nigel Biggar’s book What’s Wrong with Rights, I argue that an epidemic of rights-fundamentalism does not require the complete rejection of all rights language. Rather, it is possible to use rights language in a way that reconceptualizes and broadens our understanding of duty, and advances our moral discourse and growth in virtue, rather than hindering it. To demonstrate this point, I contrast Biggar’s example of a problematic ruling by the Canadian Supreme Court with a more thoughtful and nuanced approach to rights language demonstrated by a series of cases on free speech in schools issued by the U.S. Supreme Court. I also offer a re-reading of Francisco de Vitoria’s development of rights language to argue that his presentation of rights overcomes many of Biggar’s critiques.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it