Inalienable rights and pluralism in animal advocacy

Litigation as TB Rights Advocacy

One thousand people die every day in India as a result of TB, a preventable and treatable disease, even though the Constitution of India, government schemes, and international law guarantee available, accessible, acceptable, quality health care. Failure to address the spread of TB and to provide quality treatment to all affected populations constitutes a public health and human rights emergency...

Horacio Spector Value Pluralism and the Two Concepts of Rights

Philosophers and legal theorists still disagree about the correct analysis of ‘rights’, both moral and legal. The ‘Will Theory’ and the ‘Interest Theory’—the two main views—can each account for various features of rights, but neither of them is totally satisfactory. The controversy has now been running for decades and seems irresolvable. I will contend in this paper that the discussion of ‘valu...

Animal rights, animal minds, and human mindreading.

Do non-human animals have rights? The answer to this question depends on whether animals have morally relevant mental properties. Mindreading is the human activity of ascribing mental states to other organisms. Current knowledge about the evolution and cognitive structure of mindreading indicates that human ascriptions of mental states to non-human animals are very inaccurate. The accuracy of h...

Animal Rights Consideration is a Necessity in Conducting an Experiment

The representation of alienable and inalienable rights: games in transition function form

We propose a new type of cooperative game a game in transition function (TF) form as a means of representing social decision making procedures that is suitable for the analysis of rights. The TF form is a generalisation of the effectivity function (EF) form, and in particular it tells us (where the EF form does not) about the alienability of a right. We describe procedures for generating a (uni...