The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition1
Ariel Zylberman
University of Toronto
When Claudius poured poison into his brother’s ear did he thereby wrong King Hamlet or did he merely
perform a wrong act?
To understand this question we may distinguish two types of duties, duties with regards to another
and duties to another, and then ask which type Claudius breached.2 If you entrust upon me the care of your
ficus tree while you are away on holidays, I have duties with regards to the ficus tree, but no duties to the tree.
If upon your arrival it turns out that I have not watered the now moribund tree, I have wronged you, not the
tree. Although I have duties with regards to your tree, I have no direct normative connection to it.3 In light
of this distinction, we may ask again: is Claudius’s murder a wrong to Hamlet or merely a wrong with regards
to Hamlet?
My aim in this paper is to address a more general version of this question: What is the form of
juridical wrongs and rights? Are they wrongs to someone or merely wrongs with regards to someone? Is the
idea of a direct normative connection between you and I basic or merely derivative? I will argue that juridical
wrongs and rights are relational: in the fundamental case wrongs signify a breach of a duty to someone and
rights signify claims against others.
1
I am grateful to Matthias Haase, Doug Lavin, Arthur Ripstein, and Glenda Satne for comments on an
earlier draft.
2
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 6:442.
3
I assume for the sake of argument that we hold no duties to living organisms as such. Naturally,
environmentalists may disagree.
The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
To do so, my argument unfolds in three stages. I begin by showing that the puzzle about Claudius
arises from a tension between the common view that rights correlate with duties and traditional
philosophical views about the justificatory structure of rights. While the former presupposes the claim that
rights are necessarily relational, the latter presupposes the view that rights claims are ultimately nonrelational. While the former regards the juridical relation between two parties as normatively basic, the latter
looks for the normative ground of juridical claims outside of the relationship.
Instead of solving this puzzle by trying to reconstruct relational rights and wrongs out of the nonrelational material of right and wrong actions, my strategy will be to be dissolve the puzzle. I do so by
articulating three assumptions behind the puzzle, assumptions about the fundamental form of a juridical
judgment (§2), about the form of justification of rights (§3) and about the value of the bearer of rights (§4).
For each assumption, I develop the relational alternative according to which there is no gap between the
nature and the justification of rights.
And finally, having in view the contrast between the non-relational model of rights that informs the
puzzle and its relational alternative, I turn to a direct defense of the relational model (§5). In particular, I
argue that the non-relational model fails either because it cannot make sense of rights or if it does, it
explains rights only by presupposing the relational model.
Once we cast aside the non-relational set of assumptions about rights, we should see that there is
nothing more basic, nothing of normative significance behind, under or above, the relationship of right.
The very thought of you is already imbued by the form of equal recognition, and this form is constitutive of
the relationship of right.
1. Of Rights and Shadows: Naturalist and Institutional Ideas of Rights
When Claudius murdered his brother, we say that Claudius infringed Hamlet’s rights. But what is it for
Hamlet to bear a right? What justifies Hamlet’s claim to a right? And what is it for Claudius to infringe that
right?
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
Let me begin with the first question about the nature of individual rights. The two predominant
answers are either naturalist or institutional.4 The naturalist answer is usually that rights are valid claims
against others and that the validity of said rights is in principle independent of social and institutional
recognition. Joel Feinberg, for example, argues that a valid claim to X has two main components: the rightsbearer is at liberty in respect of X, i.e., has no duty not to relinquish or refrain from X, and this right is the
ground of duties in others either to grant X to the rights-bearer or not to interfere with X.5 Under this
model Hamlet has the right to life, and this right grounds a duty on Claudius not to interfere arbitrarily
with Hamlet’s life. Since Claudius obviously breached his duty, Claudius wronged Hamlet.
Whereas a naturalist could say that Hamlet has the right to life independently of any social or legal
recognition, the institutional theorist must deny this. Rights, as Bentham had argued, are unintelligible
independently of social or legal recognition. According to the institutional model, rights cannot be simply
valid claims. Instead, the nature of rights must be internally connected to institutional recognition. Rex
Martin, for example, argues that individual rights are institutionally accredited ways of acting or of being treated.6
Martin does not deny that rights may take the form of claims. Instead, he denies that rights can be valid
4
My discussion in this paragraph is indebted to Rex Martin, A System of Rights (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993), chapter 3.
5
Joel Feinberg, “The Nature and Value of Rights,” The journal of Value Inquiry, Vol.4 (1970), pp. 249-50.
6
Martin, A System of Rights, p. 69: “A legal right is an established way of acting or of being acted toward,
distinctively legal insofar as governmental action is required, or essentially involved, in the formulation,
enforcement, and harmonization of rights such as these. If this is so, then the identification of legal rights
with (valid) claims or with what would justify such claims, where that suggests leaving aside altogether
recognition or enforcement in law as necessary features, is simply incoherent.”
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
claims that are nonetheless not recognized by any legal institution. Under this model, Hamlet would bear
the right to life only if the laws of Denmark recognized this right.
Note, however, that despite their disagreement, naturalist and institutional theories of rights share
two key commitments.
First, both endorse the doctrine of correlativity of rights and duties. Any right that Hamlet bears
will have as a matter of logical entailment a correlative duty on a second party.7 A key claim these theories
share, then, is that rights can only be understood as paired with, correlated to the duties or obligations of
another. This claim stands in stark contrast, for instance, to views like that of Thomas Hobbes according to
which a natural right not only requires no obligation on the part of others but is in fact opposed to any
obligation. For a view like Hobbes it seems possible that a completely isolated person bear rights. By contrast
the naturalist view of rights as valid claims and the institutional view of rights as accredited ways of acting
would deny that the idea of a right without any correlative duties makes any sense.
The doctrine of correlativity to which both naturalist and institutional views subscribe enables us to
say that Claudius’s poisoning is a relational wrong, a wrong to Hamlet, rather than merely a wrong act which
happened to fall on Hamlet. Indeed, as H.L.A. Hart has argued, unless we can draw a distinction between
rights and wrongs and right actions and wrong actions, the very idea of a right would disappear.8 A society ruled
solely by the duties of natural law would declare murder and adultery wrong acts, but not wrongs to others.
7Although
Martin weakens the doctrine so that correlativity is not a matter of logical entailment,
nonetheless he retains the key thought that rights are “normatively directed.” The mere fact that
someone bears a right generates a normative constraint on the conduct of others.
8
H.L.A. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights?” The Philosophical Review, 64:2 (1955), p. 182. Feinberg
makes the same argument in “The Nature and Value of Rights.”
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
But once the idea of a wrong to another goes, so does the idea of a right. The doctrine of correlativity is
meant to capture this relational idea of right by representing correlative duties as duties owed to another. 9
However, a puzzle begins to emerge once we consider the naturalist and institutional views about
our second question concerning the justification of individual rights. What is the ground of a right?
Ronald Dworkin famously classified political theories into duty-based, right-based, and goal-based
theories, a classification others have extended to all moral theories.10 Dworkin’s central idea is that in any
political theory we may distinguish judgment types that are basic from those that are derivative. A judgment is
basic in a justificatory sense: it marks the end-point of justification in an order of judgments. Thus an Xbased theory is a theory that gives pride of justificatory place to an X-type judgment and derives the rest of
the theory from X.
9
A handful of current thinkers have defended in different ways the view that a direct connection between
two parties is normatively basic and fundamental to an understanding of juridical wrongs and rights. See
Arthur Ripstein, Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2009); Martin Stone, “The Significance of Doing and Suffering,” in G. Postema, ed., Philosophy and the
Law of Torts, (Cambridge: Cambrdige University Press, 2001), pp. 131-182; Michael Thompson, “What Is It
to Wrong Someone? A Puzzle about Justice,” in R. Jay Wallace, P. Pettit, S. Scheffler & M. Smith, eds.,
Reason and Value (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004); and Ernest Weinrib, The Idea of Private Law (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Although currently a minority, these thinkers follow a long tradition
that includes Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. Here, I mean to follow and develop this tradition.
10
Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 90-96. See also
Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) chapter 5; John Simmons, The
Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 69; and Jeremy Waldron, The Right
to Private Property, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 63-68.
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
The second commitment naturalist and institutional views share, then, concerns the form of
justification of individual rights. We justify individual rights by abstracting away from the relationship
between the two parties and focusing instead on a basic value external to the relationship of right. The basic
judgments in our theory will be either about outcomes (goal-based), or about the duties of an agent (dutybased), or about the rights of a patient (right-based). But by abstracting away from the correlative
relationship of right and focusing on just one of the terms of the relationship, we lose from view the direct
nexus between Claudius and Hamlet. This view of the justification of rights makes it difficult to understand
how Claudius could wrong Hamlet, and how Hamlet could be Claudius’s victim.
Goal-based theories focus primarily on the outcomes in the world of Claudius’s action. Although
John Stuart Mill, for instance, defends the harm principle, his utilitarianism pushes him to regard as
normatively fundamental the production of pain and well-being in the world. The central normative
consideration for a utilitarian like Mill is the production of welfare in the world. This makes it difficult to
understand how Claudius could wrong Hamlet, for the key normative consideration is instead whether
Claudius performed a bad action, rather than whether Claudius wronged someone. Utilitarians like Mill will
find it difficult to explain how Hamlet is a victim rather than simply the accidental location of diminished
welfare in the world.
Duty-based theories focus primarily on whether Claudius violates one of his duties, say, emerging
from the natural law. John Locke, for instance, argues that we may understand the rights of others as God’s
property.11 Duty-based theories similarly make it difficult to understand how Claudius could wrong Hamlet,
for what looks like a wrong to another is in fact simply a wrong to God, since the other is God’s property.
Duty-based theories like Locke’s will find it difficult to explain how Hamlet is a victim rather than the mere
occasion of Claudius’s breach of the moral law.
11
John Locke, The Second Treatise: An Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980), §6.
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
Right-based theories focus primarily on whether Hamlet’s rights are infringed. James Griffin, for
instance, argues that human rights are based on a person’s liberty and autonomy.12 Since the fundamental
normative judgment is about a person’s rights, rights may be infringed not only by other persons, but also by
natural conditions.13 Right-based theories may find it difficult to explain how Claudius is the perpetrator of a
wrong rather than merely an accidental harbinger of tragedy.
When we juxtapose these two commitments, the result is a puzzle, for naturalist and institutional
theories alike view the correlative relationship of right as normatively derivative. Judgments of right bottom
out in some value external to that relationship: outcomes, duties or further rights. We have followed Hart’s
distinction between rights and wrongs, on the one hand, and right actions and wrong actions, on the other. The
idea was that a society that possessed only the concept of right and wrong actions would not possess the
concept of rights and wrongs. Individual rights and wrongs have a relational structure: I have rights against you,
and you owe duties to me. If I can only understand your murder, torture or theft as a wrong act, but not as a
wrong to me, I cannot think of myself as a bearer of rights.
A puzzle emerges, then, because the shared commitment about justification yields precisely this
result: the fundamental normative idea is that of right and wrong actions, rather than that of rights and wrongs.
Although naturalist and institutional theories recognize that individual rights depend on the doctrine of
correlativity, their justificatory structure pushes them to locate the grounds of rights in some factor external
to that relationship. And once they deem the correlative relationship of right normatively derivative, they
put in danger the very idea of rights. By focusing exclusively on outcomes, agents or patients goal-based,
duty-based, and right-based theories tear asunder the relationship they initially hold together. And this ends
up changing the doctrine of correlativity. Rather than thinking of my rights and your duties as equally basic
12
James Griffin, On Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
13
Thus Joseph Raz argues, for example, that your rights may be infringed by “starvation and disease.” The
Morality of Freedom, p. 205.
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
elements of a single relationship, naturalist and institutional theories end up giving pride of justificatory
place to either element of the relationship. Correlativity becomes reductive. Hamlet’s rights are reducible to,
mere shadows of, Claudius’s duties. Alternatively, Claudius’s duties are reducible to, mere shadows of,
Hamlet’s rights. None of these theories allow the initial correlative view that Claudius and Hamlet are
embraced directly in a relationship of perpetrator-victim. The direct connection becomes the shadow of a
shadow and possibly a mere illusion. And once this happens, the very idea of rights becomes unstable.
Our puzzle, then, is this: how can we construct relational rights and wrongs out of the “normatively
basic” material of right and wrong actions? How can we construct Claudius’s wrong to Hamlet out of the
normatively basic material of Claudius’s wrong with regards to Hamlet? 14
14
A structurally analogous puzzle emerges in epistemology from empiricist and rationalist models of
perceptual knowledge. On the one hand, we acknowledge that perceptual knowledge must be relational, i.e.,
perceptual knowledge is my knowledge of some object or state of affairs in the world. On the other hand,
the foundationalist structure of justification requires that the ground of perceptual knowledge be intelligible
independently of the perceptual relation. Rationalists tend to focus on the object, while empiricists tend to
focus on the subject’s sensations. Hallucinations make the problem sharper, for my sensation is supposed to
be the same whether or not the object is present. The puzzle, then, is this: if perceptual knowledge is by its
nature relational but we justify our claims to know by dropping the relation entirely and focusing on only
one of its terms (the object in itself or my sensations), how is it possible to get the relational back into the
picture? The worry for the empiricist, for instance, is that once I have retreated into my phenomenal
experience, it seems very difficult, if not impossible, to build perceptual knowledge out of mere sense-data.
Kant called this common assumption of dogmatists and empiricists transcendental realism. We may call the
assumption common to naturalist and institutional theories transcendental juridical realism.
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
The puzzle is worrying because this project may be doomed. If Hart and Feinberg’s thesis is correct,
rights and wrongs are irreducibly relational. But if that is so, the justificatory structure of standard theories
renders us skeptics about rights. Rights become shadows.
2. The Monadic Assumption
Faced with this puzzle about rights, our immediate impulse may be to try to solve it by showing how there is
no tension between the nature and the justification of rights. Whether we endorse a goal-based, a duty-based
or a right-based theory, our task would be to construct relational rights from right and wrong actions.
Although I cannot show that this task is impossible, I will try to show that it is unnecessary.
Instead of solving the puzzle, we should dissolve it. We dissolve the puzzle by rejecting the
assumptions on which it rests to prevent it from arising. Our task would not be to construct relational rights
from right and wrong actions but to understand how relational rights are normatively basic. 15
The key assumption we need to articulate and reject is that the nature and justification of rights are
different creatures. We replace such assumption with the alternative view that there is no gap between the
nature and justification of rights. The ground of my right is not some further fact beyond, beneath or beside
my claim before you. Instead, the ground of my right is immanent within that claim.
In the remainder of this paper, I will try to dissolve the puzzle, then, by articulating three more
specific versions of this assumption and subsequently replacing them with the relational alternative. Each
15
There is, of course, a second way of dissolving the puzzle. We would reject the doctrine of correlativity and
stipulate that rights do not require correlative duties on others. I do not explore this possibility because most
theorists endorse the doctrine of correlativity and because, with these thinkers, I deem absurd the idea that I
can bear rights in complete isolation from others. In any case, since correlativity is so widely accepted, I will
not make it my task here to defend it. Instead, I will assume its truth and then try to accommodate its
insights within a theory of rights.
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
alternative will articulate the thought that the ground of rights is internal to rights. My main argument for
the relational model will be the following: We should endorse the relational model of rights that begins to
emerge because it explains better the relational structure of rights and wrongs without coming to the brink
of skepticism about rights.
The first specific version of the assumption that the justification of rights appeals to facts different
from their nature concerns the fundamental form of a juridical judgment. The Monadic Assumption, as I
will call it, is the view that the fundamental form of a juridical judgment is monadic.
We should begin by drawing a distinction between two basic forms of judgment: relational and
monadic. A monadic judgment represents the subject as bearing a certain property independently of any
relations the subject may have to others (e.g., Alice weighs 120 pounds). A relational judgment represents the
subject as bearing a certain property in relation to others (e.g., Toronto is larger than Vancouver). But this
contrast is still too rough, so we must draw two further distinctions. We should distinguish between weak
and strong relational judgments. A weak relational judgment is reducible to the conjunction of two monadic
judgments, while a strong relational judgment is irreducible to monadic judgments. Our former relational
judgment appears to be weakly relational, because it might be reducible to a conjunction of the monadic
judgments Toronto has X size and Vancouver has Y size. A better candidate for a strongly relational judgment
may be Toronto stands to the East of Vancouver. In addition, we should demarcate interpersonal relational
judgments from generic relational judgments, where interpersonal relational judgments represent the relation
between at least two persons. Alice gives a gift to Beth is an example of an interpersonal, strongly relational
judgment.16
16
Having articulated these subtler distinctions, I will leave them behind to focus exclusively on the contrast
between a monadic judgment and an interpersonal, strongly relational one, a contrast I will hereby abbreviate as
one between monadic and relational judgments. For parallel distinctions, see Michael Thompson, “What is
it to Wrong Someone?,” p. 335-6.
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
Although this logical contrast between monadic and relational judgments is abstract, it is perfectly
familiar to any adult who observes two infants play. When we describe infants playing, it is common to say
that the infants are not yet playing together. Instead, they are “parallel playing:” they play the same game
(building sand towers, cooking, having a tea party) separately. When infants parallel play, we describe their
activity through weakly relational judgments: A is pouring tea, and so is B; B is eating a cookie, and so is A,
etc. When infants play together, we describe their activity through strongly relational judgments: A is
pouring tea in B’s cup; B gives a cookie to A, etc. The excitement of parents at seeing their own infant
suddenly play together with another has a key logical dimension: the parents now represent the child’s
activity through strongly relational judgments. This logical shift is a sign that the infant is “growing up.”
The contrast between monadic and relational judgments gives us the language for expressing the
assumption that the justification of rights must be external to rights. Dworkin taught us that a theory is Xbased when it gives pride of justificatory place to a specific type of judgment. A practical theory is derived
from a judgment of goals, a judgment of duties, or a judgment of rights. All these judgments, we may now
say, share a common form: they are all monadic judgments. They abstract away from the relationship
between two persons and focus instead on outcomes, agents or patients. None of these judgments takes the
relational form. This is precisely why the relationship between Claudius and Hamlet appears as normatively
derivative and potentially insignificant.
Goal-based, duty-based and right-based theories (implicitly) rest on what I will call the Monadic
Assumption, namely, the view that an order of juridical judgments is ultimately grounded in a monadic
judgment. We may illustrate the Monadic Assumption through the following table:
Relational Judgment
Monadic Judgment
Claudius produces a bad outcome in the world
Claudius poisons Hamlet
Claudius breaches his duty (with regard to Hamlet)
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
Hamlet’s right is infringed
The two columns of the table illustrate the justificatory structure of X-based theories. The direction of
justification is rightwards. Relational judgments are ultimately justified by one of three types of monadic
judgments. Justification comes to an end in a monadic judgment about outcomes, duties or rights. All three
theories presuppose that the fundamental form of a juridical judgment is monadic.
In its common form, the Monadic Assumption amounts to the view that (i) juridical judgments are
relational, (ii) relational juridical judgments are normatively derivative, and (iii) a justificatory order of
juridical judgments bottoms out in a monadic judgment. Since monadic judgments represent values that are
intelligible independently of any relational juridical judgment, the Monadic Assumption repeats the general
view behind our puzzle that the fundamental ground of rights must be external to the rights themselves.
Let me illustrate how naturalist and institutional theories make the Monadic Assumption. The
naturalist represents rights as valid claims. Valid claims must be represented through a relational judgment:
Hamlet has a claim against Claudius. But we may reasonably ask, why is Hamlet entitled to such a claim?
Should we endorse, for instance, Griffin’s personhood account, our answer will take this form: Hamlet has a
valid claim because being alive is necessary for protecting the values of personhood. But notice that there has been a
shift in the form of judgment. Whereas the initial judgment was relational, the justifying judgment is
monadic. The personhood account bottoms out in the monadic judgment: Hamlet is autonomous. According
to Griffin’s picture of autonomy, the value of autonomy must be represented monadically.
Institutional theories replicate the same structure. The institutional theorist, such as Martin,
represents rights as institutionally accredited ways of acting. Institutionally accredited ways of acting must be
represented through a relational judgment: the legal institutions of Denmark vest Hamlet with the title to
life. As a result, Claudius has duties to Hamlet. But we may reasonably ask, why is Hamlet so accredited?
Institutional theories of rights, like that of Martin or Charles Beitz, tend to bottom out in urgent individual
interests. But notice that, once again, there has been a shift in the form of judgment. Whereas the initial
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
judgment was relational, the justifying judgment at the second level is monadic. Beitz’s practice account
bottoms out in the monadic judgment: Hamlet has an urgent interest in _____. According to Beitz’s picture we
fill in the blank with a value that is intelligible independently of rights and independently of relationships to
others.
We may reject the Monadic Assumption by embracing its negation, which I will call the Relational
Assumption. This is the view that the fundamental form of a juridical judgment is relational. Juridical
judgments bottom out in the relational form.
If the Monadic Assumption denies the basic normative significance of a direct connection between
two parties in a juridical relationship, the Relational Assumption affirms it. One way to explain this contrast
is by deploying the classical philosophical distinction between form and matter.17
The idea of form I have in mind is the idea of an immanent normative principle of a distinct kind. Let
me illustrate this idea through a living organism such as an oak tree.18 The form of a tree marks a distinct
17
For Aristotle’s view that a relational juridical judgment expresses a form of justice, see Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999), V. For Kant’s
view that a judgment of right represents the form of interaction between two parties, see Metaphysics of
Morals, 6:230.
18
I should mention here that for the purposes of my argument, no commitment is necessary to the view that
this idea of form must be instantiated in organic nature. Even Kant’s view appears to be that rather than
understanding the political in terms of the organic we should understand the organic as an analogy of the
political kind of organization, the political body (CPJ, n. 5:375). For this very brief account of form, I draw
from Aristotle, De Anima, 2.1-3; Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §63-5; Michael Thompson,
Life and Action, part I, specially pp. 80-82; Ernest Weinrib, “Legal Formalism: On the Immanent Rationality
of Law,” The Yale Law Journal 97:6 (1988), §2.2 and specially pp. 959-960; and Ernest Weinrib, The Idea of
Private Law, §2.6.3.
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
kind of tree, say, the oak tree, by setting apart the activity characteristic of oak trees both from that of other
life forms (such as plants and animals) and other species of trees (such as maples and Eastern white pines).
The explanation of the individual tree in terms of its form (the oak species) is an explanation of the tree in
terms of the kind of activity that constitutes an oak tree and that limits membership to that kind of activity.
But this explanation is also, in the second place, a teleological or final explanation, for a form is a normative
principle that sets the standards for judging members of that kind as embodying the form to a greater or
lesser degree, and thus as more or less defective.19 A form as a normative principle of a distinct kind constitutes a
unique type of unity. We may call a mechanical, as opposed to a teleological unity, the unity of a whole as
merely an aggregate of independently intelligible and externally related parts. A form in the mechanical sense is
a unity externally imposed on the parts. By contrast, a form in the teleological sense represents a type of unity
where the parts are unintelligible independently of their relation to each other and to the whole. A form in
the teleological sense is a unity that is internal to the parts as they relate to each other. A heap of sand is an
example of the mechanical type of unity, where each grain of sand is perfectly intelligible independently of
the other grains and of the heap. A tree is an example of the teleological type of unity. Each part of the tree
(roots, trunk, leafs, flowers, fruits, etc.) is unintelligible as the tree part it is independently of its relation to
the other parts and to the tree as a whole.
The idea of form as a normative principle of a distinct kind and as a teleological unity helps us to
understand the relational assumption in the following way. The Monadic Assumption begins from the
doctrine of correlativity, where the rights A has against B are (logically) correlative to the duties B owes to A.
But the key monadic move is that the fundamental form of a juridical judgment is monadic. The
19
Cf. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 11: “Both criteria and standards are means by which or terms in
which a given group judges or selects or assesses value or membership in some special status; but criteria, we
might say, determine whether an object is (generally) of the right kind, whether it is a relevant candidate at
all, whereas standards discriminate the degree to which a candidate satisfies those criteria.”
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
correlativity is normatively derivative. Instead, what is normatively fundamental is a judgment about the
rights of A, the duties of B, or some further desired outcome. Now using the language of form, the Monadic
Assumption renders the correlativity of rights and duties a mere aggregate rather than an articulated unity. My
rights are intelligible independently of your duties, or your duties are intelligible independently of my rights.
By contrast, the Relational Assumption regards the correlativity of rights and duties as an articulated,
teleological unity. My rights and your duties are reciprocally determining elements of an articulated whole.
Just like the root of the tree is unintelligible as root independently of its relation to the tree as a whole, my
rights and your duties are unintelligible as rights and duties independently of their relationship to each other.
The relationship of right is an articulated unity, not an aggregate.
The Monadic Assumption forces us to focus exclusively on one of the terms of the relationship (the
matter) rather than on the relationship itself (the form). As a result, we are forced to read the doctrine of
correlativity reductively: your duties are the shadows of my rights or vice-versa. But once we are liberated
from the Monadic Assumption, we may see that correlativity need not be reductive. Once we focus on the
form of our interaction, my rights and your duties form an articulated unity. Neither is reducible to the
other. The direction of justification has been reversed: rather than justifying our relationship in terms of a
monadic judgment about duties, goals, or rights, we understand and justify rights and duties in terms of the
roles they play in the whole, in our relationship of right. To say that the basic form of a juridical judgment is
relational is simply to assert that rights and duties must be understood as reciprocally determining elements
in our relationship of right.20
Let me develop the organic analogy further. There are, of course, many physical and chemical
necessary conditions for being a part of a functional biological relationship. Leaves and kidneys cannot
20
Notice that my claim here only concerns a juridical order of judgments. It may true that in other orders
(ludic, etiquette, broadly ethical) correlativity fails: some duties may have no correlative rights or vice-versa.
The Relational Assumption as I articulate it here concerns exclusively a juridical order of judgments.
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
function without protein compounds. But a reductive analysis of leaves and kidneys in terms of protein
compounds presumably cannot yield what leaves and kidneys do and what they are for. For the latter,
functional type of judgment, we need to focus on the relationship, say, between chlorophyll structures and
the photosynthetic function, or between the kidney and the urinary system. Similarly, there are many
necessary conditions for being a part of a normative relationship of right. Persons, for example, must occupy
space and be capable of intentional action. But a reductive analysis of the rights-bearer in terms of its
necessary conditions presumably cannot yield the sufficient conditions for having a right. For the latter,
relational type of judgment, we need to focus on the relationship between one person, as rights-bearer, and
another, as duty-bearer. I will return to this point about persons below (§4).
The main point for now is this. Regardless of the nature of rights, i.e., whether rights are valid claims
(naturalism) or institutionally accredited ways of acting (institutionalism), naturalist and institutional
accounts assume that the justification of rights ultimately turns on some non-relational feature. Why is one
entitled to a right? The monadic assumption is the view that we answer this question ultimately in a
monadic way: because infringing rights has bad outcomes, or because breaching duties is to perform a wrong
action or having one’s rights infringed is to suffer a wrong action. Monadic views then get entangled in the
difficult (perhaps impossible) task of deriving relational rights and wrongs from right and wrong actions. By
contrast, the relational assumption is the view that we answer the why question ultimately in a relational
way: if you infringe my right, you would wrong me. The second personal ‘you’ here is ineliminable. There is
no derivation of a relational wrong from a wrong action. Your wronging me is normatively basic. More
precisely, my having a right against you is normatively basic and is just as basic as you owing me a duty.
3. The Form of Juridical Explanation: the Instrumentalist Assumption
But as we will now see, our puzzle about the possibility of rights turns on a further assumption about the
proper form of explanation of rights. The puzzle arises, I will argue, when we assume that rights must be
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
justified instrumentally. Similarly, we can dissolve the puzzle and account for the possibility of rights more
easily when we reject the instrumentalist assumption and replace it with its non-instrumentalist alternative.
By ‘instrumentalism’ I understand a theory that grounds rights in a value external to the juridical
relationship; a value is external to the relationship when it is intelligible independently of the rights in
question.21
Our table illustrated not only the monadic assumption, but also how justification must run
rightwards and make a leap from the derivative relational column to the basic monadic column. This move
illustrates the structure of an instrumentalist account of rights, for the ground of rights is intelligible
independently of any rights.22
It is easy to see how goal-based and duty-based theories are instrumentalist. If the justification of A’s
rights turns on the promotion of an independent value, such as A’s autonomy or urgent interests, such
justification would fit within a goal-based theory. And a goal-based theory is instrumentalist. Rights are
justified by a goal whose intelligibility is independent of the rights in question. On many readings, we can
understand what autonomy and urgent interests require independently of the language of rights. Duty-based
21
Arthur Ripstein, Force and Freedom, pp. 7-11, 217, and 225. Functionalism in the law is a (welfarist) species
of instrumentalism as understood here. See Stone, pp. 133, 141; and Weinrib, The Idea of Private Law, pp. 4,
48-49.
22
I should qualify this claim. The key feature of an instrumentalist account is that it justifies rights by means
of an extra-legal value. Instrumentalism is thus a logically independent thesis from the monadic assumption,
for the extra-legal value in question may itself be intelligible only through relational judgments. However,
although logically distinct, the monadic assumption is usually found together with the instrumentalist
assumption. And in any case, both assumptions seem responsible for getting us into our puzzle about rights
in the first place. I am grateful to Glenda Satne for helping me to see how instrumentalism and “monadism”
are two logically independent assumptions.
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
theories are similarly instrumentalist. If the justification of A’s rights turns on B’s discharging her duty, such
justification would also be instrumentalist. Rights are justified by and reducible to a value whose
intelligibility is independent of the rights in question, namely, the fulfillment of a duty. Suppose that we
analyze your duty in terms of your doing God’s will. You may fail to satisfy God’s will even if, like Adam
before the creation of Eve, you are the only person in the world. But if you are completely isolated, no other
person’s rights come into the picture of your doing God’s will. The value of your acting in conformity with
God’s will is intelligible independently of the rights of others. Therefore, duty-based theories also seem to be
instrumentalist.
Nonetheless, it may be more difficult to see that right-based theories are instrumentalist as well. It
may be objected that right-based theories, precisely because they are right-based, cannot be instrumentalist.
But this would be a mistake.
While the two predominant views of the nature of rights are naturalist and institutional accounts,
the two predominant views about the justification of rights are interest- and choice-based theories. The
former is associated with figures like Jeremy Bentham and Joseph Raz; the latter with figures like Thomas
Hobbes and H.L.A. Hart.
Interest-theories ground rights in a value intelligible independently of any rights possessed by the
bearer, namely, the interests of the rights-bearer. Joseph Raz’s explanation of rights exemplifies both the
monadic and instrumentalist assumptions: although my rights are grounds for your correlative duties, the
ultimate ground of my rights is a sufficiently important aspect of my well-being.23 Raz thus reduces duties to
rights and rights to aspects of your well-being. But notice that the relevant aspects of your well-being are
intelligible independently of any specific rights. It may be fundamental to your well-being that you do not
suffer from the pangs of hunger or disease, but neither hunger nor disease require the language of rights to
appreciate their value. Similarly, the badness of hunger and disease are intelligible independently of any
23
Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom, ch. 7, specially p. 180.
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
relation you have to others. Your hunger is no less bad when you suffer it alone. If this is correct, Raz’s
interest-theory of rights furnishes a paradigmatic example of a monadic and instrumentalist explanation of
rights.24
This leaves a right-based theory with one apparently non-instrumental option: a choice-based theory
of rights. Choice-theorists argue that we should understand rights as the protections of your capacity for
choice.25 Their key claim is that rights are the protections of your capacity to decide about some subject
matter. However, choice theories end up characterizing both the choice and its subject matter independently
of rights. If rights protect your capacity to choose the person you marry, but your capacity to choose the
person you marry is itself intelligible independently of rights, choice-theories have ended up justifying rights
instrumentally. Similarly, residents of a world ruled exclusively by natural law may have the capacity to
choose about a number of subject matters (where to work, where to live, what career to pursue, etc.),
without having the idea of individual rights at all. And to the extent this is so, choice-based theories of rights
require an instrumentalist form of justification.
In the end, right-based and duty-based theories are mirror images of each other. One justifies the
relationship of right by focusing exclusively on the non-relational duty of one of the parties; the other
justifies the relationship of right by focusing exclusively on the non-relational right (or the extra-legal interest
or choice) of one of the parties. By abstracting away from the relationship of right and focusing on some
feature of the agents that is intelligible independently of the relationship, both theories betray their monadic
24
I am thus less charitable than Michael Thompson. Thompson thinks that for Raz the correlativity of rights
and duties is normatively basic “if the concept of interest dependence is taken narrowly.” (n.23, p. 350) I
think that Raz’s interest-theory of rights betrays a commitment both to the Monadic Assumption and to
instrumentalism so that no “narrow” reading of Raz’s interest theory would save him from these
assumptions. I cannot embark here on a proper defense of this claim.
25
See H.L.A. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights?,” pp. 175-178.
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
and instrumentalist assumptions. To the extent that right-based theories regard rights as more basic than
duties, they have shifted from our ordinary relational rights, the rights I have against you, to philosophical
non-relational rights, the rights I have regardless of any relationships I stand to others. To the extent that
right-based theories justify rights by virtue of interests or choices intelligible independently of rights, they are
just as instrumentalist as duty-based theories. However, if we regard ordinary relational rights as basic, as we
have seen, neither right nor duty can be normatively prior to the other. Both must be equal and reciprocally
determining elements within a single whole.
As with the previous, monadic assumption, we may avoid our puzzle about rights and its potential
skepticism by rejecting the instrumentalist assumption. The non-instrumentalist view is that we justify rights
by staying within the relational, juridical column.
Let me begin to articulate the character of a non-instrumentalist theory of rights negatively. Recall that
instrumentalist theories begin by conceding the importance of the doctrine of correlativity. But they end up
reading this doctrine reductively due to the foundationalist pressure to ground an order of juridical
judgments in a monadic judgment. A non-instrumentalist theory of rights will justify particular rights by
showing their relation to a whole system of juridical judgments, none of which bears the monadic form and
none of which is extra-juridical. In justifying rights, we cannot step outside the relationship of right. But the
form of that relationship is the correlativity of my rights and your duties. Thus, we must justify rights by
showing how they are aspects of the articulated teleological whole of the juridical relationship in which I
stand to you. The answer to the question why Hamlet has rights against Claudius cannot abstract away from
the relationship in which Claudius and Hamlet stand.
But in order to characterize a non-instrumentalist theory positively we must turn first to a third
assumption concerning the nature and value of the bearer of rights, i.e., the person.
5. The Juridical Idea of the Person
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
Rejecting the key assumption the nature and justification of rights are externally related will require that we
take an extra step and examine its roots in a particular idea of the subject of the juridical judgment.
Let me begin to articulate this idea by considering James Griffin’s contrast between what he regards
as the two most fundamental ways of understanding the value of personhood.26 On the one hand stands
what he calls the “deontological” understanding. Persons stand in contrast to things: while the value of a
thing is its price, a value that renders the thing perfectly fungible with another thing of an equivalent price,
the value of a person is its dignity, a value that renders the person perfectly non-fungible. This deontological
picture of the value of persons is characteristic of right-based theories, according to which we ought to
understand rights, for instance, as trumps against aggregates of any other type of moral consideration. On the
deontological view, personhood has a value independent from any other end that promotes the quality of a
person’s life. On the other hand stands what Griffin calls the “teleological” understanding of the value of
personhood. On this latter picture, the value of personhood stands on the same footing with any other
instrumental value essential to the promotion of a good life. Since on the teleological understanding the
value of personhood is instrumental to the promotion of a good life, there is no theoretical barrier to “tradeoffs” between the value of personhood and other essential values, such as achievement, deep personal
relations, authenticity, etc. Griffin’s contrast between the two fundamental conceptions of the value of
personhood, then, turns on the basic question of whether such value is vulnerable to trade-offs with other
values and if so, to what extent. We are back to the debate between right-based and goal-based theories.
For our purposes, Griffin’s contrast between deontological and teleological pictures of the value of
personhood is deeply illuminating not because of what the contrast captures, but because of what it assumes
and leaves out. Griffin’s contrast turns on the assumption that the value of personhood must be represented in a
monadic judgment. Setting aside the issue of whether the value of personhood is subject to trade-offs, Griffin
assumes that this value is intelligible independently of any relationship one person bears to another. The
26
James Griffin, On Human Rights, pp. 35-6 and 57.
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
value of personhood may consist, as Griffin himself argues, at least partly in the person’s autonomy. The
deontological and teleological understandings differ on the normative status of the value of autonomy, i.e.,
whether autonomy is a value that may be traded-off with other values or not. Consequently rights protecting
autonomy in the deontological sense will appear as trumps, and rights protecting autonomy in the
teleological sense will have to be balanced or weighed with other values. But both understandings assume
that the value of autonomy must be expressed in a non-relational judgment, such as, a person is autonomous
when she chooses her path in life.27 Other persons figure in this account as incidental material for the exercise of
autonomy, either as enablers or as hindrances, but not as essential partners for the realization of autonomy.
The Monadic Idea of the Person, then, is the view that the value of personhood is monadic and
therefore intelligible independently of any relationship the person may bear to other persons. A juridical
person is a particular kind of thing that has rights. Persons are understood as things, but things somehow
possessing a special normative and monadic property that enables them to bear rights. Philosophers disagree,
of course, about the nature of this special normative property (e.g., choice or autonomy, interests and wellbeing, self-consciousness, rational perfection, etc.), but they tend to agree that the special normative property
is monadic, a property intelligible independently of the relationship the person bears to other persons.
The Instrumentalist assumption, recall, is that a judgment of right takes this form: ‘A has the right to
X because _____’ We fill the blank with an extra-legal value, and we usually represent such value through a
monadic judgment about goals, duties or rights (interests or choices). But the monadic move rightwards
raises further justificatory pressure: why must you produce such and such outcomes? Why do you bear such
duty? Why do you posses such rights? The answer turns on the (relative?) intrinsic value of the bearer of
duties or rights. Our instrumentalist judgment form becomes slightly more concrete: ‘A has the right to X
because A is _____’ The blank will now be filled by another monadic judgment, one specifying the nature
27
For this formulation, see Griffin, On Human Rights, p. 33.
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
and value of the person. For the Monadic picture, the Monadic Idea of the Person plays the role of ultimate
ground in an order of juridical judgments.
Accordingly, we may dissolve our puzzle by rejecting the Monadic Idea of the Person and replacing
it with a suitably relational alternative. I begin to do so by turning to the Stoic origins of the juridical idea of
the person.
The middle Stoic Panaetius was the first Stoic to extend systematically the metaphor of the prosopon,
the role an actor plays, to the role real human beings play in moral life. Panaetius’s idea is that we may
understand appropriate actions and the duties we have to others (kathekonta) in terms of the idea of the
prosopon. Paneatius’s further innovation is to categorize our kathekonta into four basic roles and to rank them
in order of importance.28 Although Cicero and Seneca further develop the four-personae theory, I want to
focus on Epictetus’s version as a particular poignant appropriation and development of Panaetius’s
thought.29
Like the earlier Stoics Zeno and Chrysippus, Epictetus argues that our most fundamental selfunderstanding ought to be as citizens of a cosmic city composed of both human and divine denizens. But
unlike the earlier and radical Cynics, Epictetus is careful to emphasize that our self-understanding as cosmic
citizens is compatible with a more earthly citizenship constituted by all manner of particular commitments
to others. It is worthwhile to quote Epictetus at length:
28
For a helpful discussion of Panaetius, see Michael Frede, “A Notion of a Person in Epictetus,” in T.
Scaltsas & Andrew S. Mason (eds.), The Philosophy of Epictetus. (Oxford University Press, 2007).
29
My choice of Epictetus turns on the conciseness and clarity of his view and on the fact that Epictetus
clearly views these roles as constituting a stratified normative order, whereas it is not as clear whether Cicero
(or Panaetius for that matter) had such a systematic and lexical order in view. For further discussion of the
four personae theory, see Christopher Gill, “Personhood and Personality: The Four-Personae Theory in Cicero,
De Officiis I,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 1988 6:169-199.
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
Consider who you are. First of all a human being, and this means that you have nothing more
authoritative than your power of moral choice and everything else is subordinate to it, but it itself is
free and independent... you are a citizen of the cosmos and a part of it... So, what is the
commitment of a citizen? To have no private advantage, not to deliberate about anything as though
one were a separate part but just as if the hand or foot had reasoning power and were able to follow
the arrangements of nature, they would never have sought or desired anything except after referring
to the whole... Next, remember that you are a son. What is the commitment made by this role? That
he considers all that is his own as being under his father’s sway... If you take it into account in your
deliberations, then each of these designations will outline the appropriate actions on each
occasion.30
For our purpose, two points in Epictetus’s appropriation of the four-personae theory are important.
The first is the thought that being a human being, unlike the being of things, is a normative and
relational affair. To understand that you are a human being, Epictetus argues, is to understand yourself as
standing in a certain relationship to others, a relationship he calls citizenship in the cosmos. On this picture,
being a person is not possessing a special normative property. Instead, being a person is standing in certain
forms of relationships to others. For this reason, Epictetus conceives the idea of a human being as internally
connected with certain commitments, the commitments incumbent on any member of the cosmic city. Such
commitments are not the external, relational aspect of an internal, non-relational thing (the human being);
such commitments are constitutive of being human. Arguably Epictetus does not make the monadic move. It
is not that you are a citizen of the cosmos because you have the independently intelligible power of moral
choice. Epictetus’s point seems to be relational. We only understand your power of moral choice because of
your relational standing as a citizen of the cosmos, as a part in an articulated cosmic whole.
30
Epictetus, Discourses 2.10, in B. Inwood and L. Gerson (trans.), The Stoics Reader (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing Company, 2008), p. 200.
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
The second point is an upshot of the first: if we understand the nature and value of a person only
by virtue of the relationships in which she stands to others, no person is confined to playing a single role or
to having only one type of normative commitment to others. Indeed, the relational picture makes it possible
for a single relationship to be constituted by a nested order of relational commitments. Teachers and
parents have the duty to respect the physical integrity of the children in their charge, a duty they have to any
other person. But they also have specific duties to these children: teachers ought to educate their students,
and parents ought to nourish their children, physically and emotionally.
What I want to retrieve from the Stoic tradition is a juridical view of the person fundamentally
different from the Monadic one. We might call this alternative the “Relational Idea of the Person.”
According to this latter idea, a person is not a thing bearing special normative properties; a person is a
relational standing. As Thompson puts it, the judgment X is a person is a de-relativization of a prior
relational judgment X is a person in relation to Y, just like X is a sister is a de-relativization of the prior bipolar
judgment X is a sister to Y.31 Just as it is impossible for you to be a sister if you have never had a sibling, it is
impossible for you to be a person if you have never faced another person. The relationship of right is
constitutive of personhood analogously to the way that your relationship to the offspring of your parents is
constitutive of your siblinghood.
Notice, once again, that the necessary conditions for juridical personhood may themselves be nonrelational, but this does not mean that the sufficient conditions must be equally non-relational. In order to
be a sibling you need to be born, but being a sibling is not a way of being born. Siblinghood is a relational
standing you have to the offspring of your parents. There are no non-relational sufficient conditions for
siblinghood. Similarly, there are no non-relational sufficient conditions for juridical personhood.
If we return to my earlier contrast between two ideas of form or of unity, a mechanical and a
teleological one, we begin to see how the Monadic Idea of the Person understands persons on the model of
31
See Michael Thompson, “What is to Wrong Someone,” p. 353.
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
a heap of sand: a grain of sand is intelligible independently of the relationships it bears to other grains of
sand. Just as comprehension of the grain of sand presumably requires representation by a monadic
judgment of the form A grain of sand is ____ where the blank is filled by some non-relational property,
comprehension of the person presumably requires representation by a monadic judgment of the form A
person is _____ where the blank is filled by some non-relational normative property. The heap (the relations
of one grain to another) is purely external to the nature of the grain; the juridical nexus (the juridical form
of the relation of one person to another) is purely external to the nature of the person. By contrast, the
Relational Idea of the Person represents persons on the model of a teleological unity: a hand or foot is
unintelligible independently of the relationships it bears to the body as a whole. As Aristotle used to say,
outside of the context of the living body, a foot is a foot only homonymously. We may say that outside of the
context of the relationship of right, a person is a person only homonymously.
The family of monadic assumptions coalesces into a force that compels us to leap out of the
relationship of right into a monadic value most fundamentally expressed as the value of the person. The
family of relational ideas encourages us to move in the opposite direction. We only comprehend the idea of
individual rights and of a rights-bearer precisely by staying within the relationship of right rather than leaping
out of it.
So what is it to be a bearer of rights? What is a person? These questions are fundamental, but they
are also fundamentally misleading. They are misleading because they tempt us to think of the relationship
between persons as merely external, just like the heap is external to the nature of the grain of sand. They are
misleading because they appear to be different questions. A bearer of rights stands in certain juridical
relationships to others; a person is a thing with a special normative property (e.g., dignity, autonomy,
rationality, etc.). The core of personhood is supposed to stand behind, or underneath, the relationship of
right as a non-relational property. To get a picture of the rights-bearer we must start with a monadic account
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
of the value of personhood and then somehow get strong relations back into the picture. This is the same
task, raised to a higher level, of solving the puzzle.
However, we have reason to reject this strategy. Just like two infants playing together is irreducible
to parallel playing, relational rights are not reducible to a monadic value and an added weak relation.
Similarly, we have reason to reject the assumption that the value of personhood is monadic, something
hovering above or underneath our relations to others. What is distinctive about a person as bearer of rights
is precisely what the monadic idea of the person does not let us see: you are constituted as a person by
standing in a relationship of right to others. The nexus between a person and her rights, and between rights
and the value of their bearer, is internal. We must resist the temptation to confuse the non-relational
necessary conditions of personhood such as being an object, occupying space, or being alive with the
normative, sufficient conditions for personhood. Only my relation to another person as rights- and dutybearer is sufficient to give us juridical personhood.
In sum, if we are to dispel the monadic view, we cannot answer the question of personhood with
the monadic judgment A is a person if and only if ______ and by filling the blank with some non-relational
property. Instead, we must understand persons as one of the parties in the relational juridical judgment A
has rights against B, and B owes correlative duties to A. You and I count as persons not because of a monadic
property we share in common, but because you and I can play the roles of A and B in the relational juridical
judgment. Either one of us can be subject and indirect object, or addressee, of such judgment.
6. The Very Thought of You: The Reciprocity Condition
The assumption that our initial questions about the nature and justification of rights have logically
independent answers has got us into a puzzle. How can we generate strongly relational rights from a
monadic value plus weak relations? If it is correct to suppose that strong interpersonal relations (like having
rights against each other, being a sibling or playing together) are irreducible to weak relations (like having
27
The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
the same size, or parallel playing), then the answer must be that no rights can be generated from a monadic
value. Rights become shadows.
I have been arguing that we should endorse the relational model of rights because it avoids the
puzzle and dodges the threat of skepticism about rights. I now want to sharpen this argument by showing
that the monadic model of rights either cannot explain juridical categories like rights and duties, or, if it
does, it can only do so by presupposing the basic normative status of the relational assumptions. I will
develop this argument in detail for the Monadic Idea of the Person. If the argument succeeds, the extension
to the other assumptions should be straightforward.
Very roughly, I argue that the monadic idea of the juridical person is intelligible only against the
presupposed background of the relational idea of the person. The point is that the monadic idea may
succeed in capturing many important aspects of personhood in non-relational terms, but these are simply
the necessary conditions of personhood. The monadic idea only captures what is normatively sufficient to
personhood by surreptitiously relying on the relational idea that the relationship of right is constitutive of
personhood. The juridical judgment I am a person turns out to be parasitic on the relational judgment you are
my equal in rights and duties. If that is so, the relational idea of the person must be normatively basic. And this
would mean that we only understand ourselves as rights-bearers by jettisoning the monadic model of the
person. Let me now develop this argument in more detail.
Part of the motivation behind the monadic idea of the person is that it is not just me who is
entitled to certain rights by the mere fact of being a person. The powerful moral thought behind this idea of
personhood is its generalized version, the idea that every person possesses an equal entitlement to basic rights
by the mere fact of being a person.
This means that the monadic idea of the person presupposes what I shall call the “Reciprocity
Condition,” the view that if you have duties to me based on my rights, then I have the same duties to you.
If I have the right to life and you have the duty to respect my right to life, say, by not murdering or torturing
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
me, I have the very same duties to you. But if I have the same duties to respect your life, this means that you
must have the very same right to life against me that I have against you.
To appreciate the force of the reciprocity condition we should distinguish general from special rights
and duties. Unlike special rights and duties which arise either from specific transactions between persons
(e.g., a specific contract) or from specific standing relationships between persons (e.g., sergeant-troop, parentchild), general rights emerge simply from a person’s standing qua person. General rights correlate to general
duties.32 This distinction was implicit in Epictetus’s claim that certain commitments attach to general roles,
like the role citizen of the cosmos, while others attach to special roles, like the role son or councilor.
When it comes to special rights and duties, the reciprocity condition most often fails. The rights and
duties of a sergeant, a teacher or a parent are not those of a troop, a student or a teenage son. When I
promise to you that I will care for your ficus tree, you now have rights that I do not have, the right, namely,
that someone care for your ficus tree. The reciprocity condition fails for special right-duty pairs because such
pairs are usually asymmetrical.
However, when it comes to general right-duty pairs, it is crucial to see that the reciprocity condition
must hold. That is because when it comes to general rights, rights attaching to your standing as a person, you
and I stand in a perfectly symmetrical condition. If I have the general right to freedom of expression, you
have the correlative duty to not interfere with my speech. But the mere fact that you have this general duty to
me entails both that I must owe you the very same duty and that you must bear the very same right to
freedom of expression. We can state the reciprocity condition thus: if have a general right to X against you,
you must have a correlative duty to me with regards to X, and consequently you must also have the same
right to X against me, and I the correlative duty to you. You and I are one in general rights.
32
For this well-known distinction, see, for instance, H.L.A. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights?,” The
Philosophical Review 64: 2 (1955): 188.
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
Keeping in view the reciprocity condition is important for understanding the form of first-person
and second-person juridical judgments. If the reciprocity condition holds, my thought of you as bound by a
duty to me presupposes that I think of you as an equal person to me, i.e., a person bearing the very same
general duties I bear. And if this is so, when I think of myself as a bearer of rights I presuppose that I am an
equal person to you, i.e., a person bearing the very same general rights you bear.
If we set aside the juridical asymmetry introduced by special rights and duties, two persons must
always stand in a perfectly symmetrical relationship. Each must have the very same rights and duties as the
other. But given the symmetrical reciprocity condition, whenever I think of you as having a certain general
duty to me, I must think of myself as having the very same duty to you. The same occurs on the side of rights.
Given the symmetry brought out by the reciprocity condition, whenever I think of myself as having certain
general rights against you, I must think of you as having the very same rights against me.
But what is the significance of the reciprocity condition? I would like to highlight two crucial
upshots of symmetrical form brought out by the reciprocity condition. The first is that the reciprocity
condition is a representation of the normative form of the doctrine of correlativity. This form is the norm of
equal recognition. If I stand in a juridical relationship, I am bound to recognize you as my equal.
It is of crucial importance to realize that equal recognition has three features: it is formal, juridical
and relational. Equal recognition is formal because what I recognize in you is not a particular basic value.
You and I are not equals because we equally deserve to possess a certain measure of a good like well-being,
rationality, autonomy, or any other substantive value. We are not equals because we possess the same urgent
interests. In our terms, this judgment of equality would be merely weakly relational. Instead, our equality is
formal and strongly relational: our equal standing as rights-bearer vis-à-vis each other is irreducible to a
monadic property, just like to the left of is irreducible to occupying a certain space or being a sibling to is
irreducible to being born to these parents. Equality of recognition, then, is formal, strongly relational and
juridical. It is juridical because our formal and strongly relational equality is precisely our equal standing vis-
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
à-vis each other with regards to our general rights and duties. Our rights and duties are strongly relational,
then, in the sense that they are rights against each other and duties owed to the other.
The second upshot of the reciprocity condition is that there is an internal conceptual connection
between first-person and second-person juridical judgments. Second-person juridical judgments like you are
bound to respect my right to the security of my person entail the first-person judgment I have a right to the security of
my person against you. But notice two crucial features of this logical relationship. The first is that the
entailment runs also in the other direction. The first-person judgment I have a right to the security of my person
against you entails the second-person juridical judgment you are bound to respect my right to the security of my
person. This mutual entailment further supports the view that the reciprocity condition brings out the
strongly relational character of our rights and our status as persons. The second crucial feature is that, given
the reciprocity of general rights, when I judge that I have the right to X I must also judge that you have the
very same right to X. This generates a new form of entailment. First-person juridical judgments like I have the
right to security of the person entails you have the right to security of the person. And the entailment here also runs
both ways.
These two features should not be surprising to anyone familiar with the doctrine of correlativity.
What may be more surprising, however, is the result that there is an internal connection between firstperson and second-person general juridical judgments. The second-person judgment involves me in the
same way in which my first-person judgment involves you. This is not a coincidence. After all, the surprising
and crucial element of this conceptual relation is that either one of us can occupy either role. The first-person
judgment I have a right to the security of my person against you is not a thought exclusively for me, but rather is a
thought that both of us must have if either of us is to think of ourselves as bearers of rights.
The reciprocity condition and the norm of equal recognition bring out the surprising logical fact that
there is a latent identity between a first-person and a second-person juridical judgment. Whenever I think of
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
myself as a bearer of general rights, I must think of you as bound to me. But you must think the very same
thought.
If the monadic idea of the person is indeed committed to the reciprocity condition, as it appears to
be, then the monadic idea of the person has explanatory power only because it presupposes the relational
idea. It presupposes the relational idea because, at bottom, the monadic idea leads to the recognition that
first-person and second-person general juridical judgments are essentially the same, rather than externally
and contingently related judgments. The judgment I am a juridical person is not really monadic because it is a
thought for two: you and I think the very same thought when you and I are in a relationship of right. The
judgment I am a juridical person is not a monadic but a relational judgment because it represents the unity
of first-person and second-person general juridical judgments.
This is a good moment to review my argument. I first argued that the monadic idea of the person
presupposes the reciprocity condition. If I think of you as bound to me, I must think of you as bearing the
same general rights and duties I bear. I then argued that the reciprocity condition brings out the key
juridical norm of equal recognition. Reflection on the reciprocity condition and the norm of equal
recognition led us to see that there is an internal connection between first-person and second-person
juridical judgments. I can only judge that you bear certain general duties to or rights against me if I can
judge myself as bearing the very same general duties to and rights against you. Crucially, the converse must
also obtain: I can only judge myself as having certain general rights against and duties to you if I can judge
you as bearing the same general rights and duties. If the argument so far is correct, it should deal a fatal
blow to the monadic idea of the person.
The monadic idea of the person is the view that we best comprehend the value of the person
through a monadic judgment. This means that the relations of one person to another are completely
external and accidental to the nature and value of the person. But if this is so, the first-person judgment I
am a bearer of rights should be intelligible independently of any second-person judgment. Put differently, for
the monadic idea to hold its ground, the first-person judgment I am a bearer of rights must have no logical
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
entailments to second-person juridical judgments. Thus, the judgment I have the right to life must not entail
you have the right to life, etc. But the reciprocity condition to which the monadic person is committed brings
out two kinds of entailments: one between my rights and your duties, and the other between my rights and
your rights. Since our general rights are identical, the judgment I have the general right to X entails the
judgment you have the general right to X, and vice-versa. Thus the reciprocity condition entails that the firstperson judgment I am a bearer of rights is unintelligible independently of second-person juridical judgments.
It also entails that the judgments I am a bearer of rights and you are a bearer of rights are in fact the very same
thought. This is because when you and I stand in a relationship of right, we must think the very same
thought I am a juridical person. I can only think of myself as a bearer of rights against you. But this means that
you can only think of yourself as a bearer of rights against me.
If this line of reasoning is correct, the monadic idea of the person bears the seeds of its own
destruction. For the monadic idea, the judgment I am a person is logically independent from my thoughts of
you. Of course, there might be a sense in which I can think of myself as a person without thinking of you: I
can think of myself as a being with certain capacities, or perhaps as a psychological or spatial continuity.
However, as the reciprocity condition brings out, I cannot think of myself as a juridical person, as a bearer
of rights, without thinking of you. I cannot think of my general rights without thinking that you have the
very same rights. The reciprocity condition leads to the conclusion that the judgment I am a person is always
a thought for two.
When I think of myself as a person I do not go through the syllogism: All persons are ____ (blank
filled by monadic property); I possess _____; therefore I am a person. Given the logical features of the
reciprocity condition, thinking of myself as a person cannot be going through this syllogism, which starts
from a monadic property and then represents others in a weakly relational way, i.e., as having the same
monadic property. Instead, the reciprocity condition and the norm of equal recognition bring out the latent
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
form of first-personal juridical judgments. When I think of myself as a person I think of myself as your equal.
But if this is right, the second-personal you is ineliminable from my first-person juridical thought.
Once we realize this logical feature of the reciprocity condition, we also realize that the monadic
idea of the person collapses into the relational one. This is to say that the monadic idea is capable of any
explanatory work of the idea of rights by surreptitiously relying on the relational idea. The monadic idea
gives us the impression that we are explaining rights by building from a monadic property. Its commitment
to the reciprocity condition shows that this is an illusion: it can only explain the thought I am a bearer of
rights by relying on the strongly relational judgments my rights correlate to your duties to me and you and I have
the very same general rights. And this reinforces the analogy with other strongly relational concepts like sibling
and kidney. Just like the concepts of siblings and kidneys cannot be reduced to their monadic necessary
conditions (being born to my parents or having a certain protein structure) but require strongly relational
judgments, the concept of a rights bearer cannot be reduced to its monadic necessary conditions but
requires the strongly relational judgment characteristic of the mutual entailment of first-person and secondperson judgments of general rights.
7. The Very Thought of You: Rights as Entitlements to Equal Recognition
Supposing that I have succeeded in dissolving our puzzle about rights by replacing the monadic assumptions
with their relational counterparts and by arguing, specifically, that the monadic idea of the person has
explanatory power only by surreptitiously relying on the relational idea, what does this all mean for our
initial questions about the nature and justification of rights and wrongs?
The key lesson I mean to draw from this reflection is that our questions about the nature and
justification of rights are internally related. To comprehend the nature of rights is thereby to comprehend
their justification, and to justify rights is thereby to have explained their nature. This means that we cannot
look for the ground of rights in some value independent from rights. One might be tempted to think that if
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
there is no external justification of rights, rights are arbitrary. But this is exactly the inference I have been
trying to resist. The justification of rights is immanent to their nature. What could this mean?
If we reject the monadic assumption, we presume that the fundamental form of a juridical
judgment is relational, and if we reject the instrumentalist assumption, we adopt a non-instrumental model
of the justification of rights. Aristotle and Kant, I think, used this non-instrumental model to explain the
normativity of organisms like leaves and kidneys. We understand the nature of a leaf or kidney by
understanding its function, its normative role within the whole. And we understand the normative role
within the whole organism not by explaining the organ in terms of its monadic necessary conditions (even if
these are important in a different level of analysis), but instead by understanding the strongly relational role
the organ plays in the organism. The leaf photosynthesizes; the kidney filters blood. Similarly, I have been
arguing that we should deploy this model for understanding the nature and justification of rights. We
understand the nature of a right by understanding its normative role within the whole. The whole in
question, in its most immediate stage, is the relation between two persons. The role a right plays within such
a whole is to demarcate a specific type of normative relationship: my entitlement to equal recognition.
My entitlement to equal recognition, recall, is formal and strongly relational. Equal recognition is
not the entitlement that others recognize the value of a monadic property I bear, such as dignity or
autonomy. Instead, equal recognition is strongly relational and formal. It simply represents this norm: you
and I ought to interact with each other as equals in general rights. The norm of equal recognition thus informs the
latent identity between first- and second-person judgments about general rights. The judgment I have general
right X entails you have general right X, and vice-versa. There is nothing more to the norm of recognition.
And yet, in spite of its spare formality, the norm of equal recognition can illuminate the way in
which the nature and the justification of rights is identical. At bottom, rights just are entitlements to equal
recognition; we justify rights essentially by showing how they are requirements of equal recognition.
Although formal, this relational view of rights stands in stark contrast to the predominant accounts of the
nature and justification of rights. Naturalist and institutional models of rights tend to make the
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
instrumentalist assumption that the ground of rights is in principle intelligible independently of rights.
Rights are thus justified by some type of interest or choice. The relational view of rights as entitlements to
equal recognition eschews the three monadic assumptions usually made by predominant theories. We
understand rights as entitlements to equal recognition when we eschew the assumption that at bottom
juridical judgments take a monadic form, the assumption that we justify rights instrumentally, and the
assumption that the value of personhood is intelligible non-relationally.
Reflection on the reciprocity condition brought out surprising logical facts about first-person and
second-person judgments about general rights. We realized that there is a latent unity behind such
judgments, informing the logical fact that they mutually entail each other. This is due to the symmetrical
character of the basic principle of rights, the norm of equal recognition. And if my argument is correct, we
have also seen how the monadic idea of the person is able to account for rights only by relying on this basic
principle.
To the extent that my arguments persuade, we should begin to imagine differently what it is for me
to think of you juridically. The Monadic Model encourages a familiar yet odd picture. It represents my
thought of you as the output of a theoretical syllogism starting from the premise All persons are _____, then
filling the blank with some non-relational normative property, and finally asserting that you are a particular
instance of this general concept. The general structure of the account is to begin with some monadic
property and then to reduce rights, duties and the value of personhood to a weakly relational concept. This
structure got us into our puzzle about rights.
However, in the fundamental case, the direction of the argument is precisely the converse. I start
from the thought you are my equal in general rights, a thought identical with I am a bearer of general rights. And
from that thought I may move to the more general one a person bears such and such general rights and duties. We
must avoid the natural temptation to think the latter judgment more fundamental, as if it gave us a
metaphysical snapshot of the internal constitution of a person. In this sense, juridical judgments, like
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The Very Thought of (Wronging) You: the Form of Equal Recognition
organic judgments, are strongly relational. In thinking of you as a person, you and I think the same thought.
I am a bearer of rights is always a thought for two.
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