Perspectivism and Rights

Abstract

Perspectivism is the view that what an agent ought to do always needs to be determined relative to this agent’s epistemic position. Despite its many virtues, this theory appears crucially flawed in its inability to properly account for the existence of universal claim rights. This article draws out this incompatibility through a set of plausible and widely accepted conceptual claims. It then discusses options available to the perspectivist in reaction to this problem. A wholesale denial of universal rights is rejected and a different approach suggested. Perspectivists should reconceptualize the notion of obligation that is correlative to rights and should conceive of obligations as only prima facie normative, which means that obligations can fail to give any normative reasons under certain circumstances. Such a move might first appear radical. However, this article shows that a prima facie view still manages to retain some of the most important conceptual features of rights