Date: Tue, 8 May 2007 13:36

From: Allan Beever

Subject: OBG Ltd

It surely is a fact that Jason’s body is his body and not my body. But that doesn’t explain why he can sue you but I cannot in my example. To explain this, we need an ought not an is. Why is it uninformative to say that Jason has a right to his body and I don’t and that is why he can sue and I cannot? Of course, as you point out, this cannot be the whole story that explains the whole of the law, but can’t it be part of the story?

And it is also important to be careful to avoid equivocating here in our use of possessives (not that I am saying you did this). Take Jason’s reputation. The reason he can sue for the damage to his reputation is not just because it is a reputation about him. It is because the reputation in some way belongs to him. This is part of what it means to say, in these contexts, that it is his reputation. But that it just to say that he has a right to it. Ditto with respect to his privacy and even his body. There is a sense in which the bodies of slaves are not theirs which is part of the reason they could not sue and part of the reason slavery is so unjust.

Also, I take your point that ‘"Rights" here are simply correlative to "obligations"’ (though I may not have appreciated your meaning exactly), but if this is correct, then it seems to me to follow that if we really understood the obligation then we should be able to express it correlatively in terms of rights. Conversely, an inability to do so is likely to reveal that we don’t really understand the obligation.

Or so it seems to me.

Allan

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From: Andrew Dickinson
Sent: 08 May 2007 13:09
Subject: [Spam?] RE: ODG: RE: OBG Ltd.

Jason's bodily integrity (as his privacy or reputation) is a fact, but a (legal) "right to" bodily integrity is something quite different. It is a legal construct and, in my view, tells us nothing interesting about the scope of protection which the law affords to individuals by means of the law of obligations. Thus, the law of negligence does not offer protection for certain instances of negligently caused personal injury, just as it does offer protection in certain limited circumstances for economic loss resulting from personal injury or damage to property of third persons. "Rights" here are simply correlative to "obligations", but the content of both is a reflection of the protection which the legal system is willing to provide by means of judicial determination. In my example, one might say that the indirect claimant has a "right" to integrity of his relationship with the person deceived, just as the person deceived has a "right" not to be misled, but I not think that either construct is useful. Rather, we should be asking, who deserves to be protected by the civil law from lies told by others, and one cannot escape the conclusion that the line to be drawn is one of policy.

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