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This short paper, published in the Edinburgh Review's 'Encyclopaedia' section, was written at a time when rights discourse was on the eve of establishing its hegemony in political theory. Seen in retrospect, the paper tests the air and senses the links between rights-based thinking and emergent neoliberalism. Because the piece is in this way linked to a specific “historical” situation, the 1987 text has been changed as little as possible – although the website version makes some mainly verbal alterations. The footnotes, which draw upon an originally-given short list of “further readings”, are a new (2013) addition. A reader of the piece is reminded that – despite all too frequent present-day rhetoric – an attack on the view that moral and ethical judgements may usefully be seen in terms of rights is not the same thing as an attack on moral and ethical judgements per se.

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