The philosophy of rights has been a perennial topic of discussion not only because it is rooted in the intellectual tradition and political practices of many countries, but also because it displays deep divisions of opinion on fundamental issues . Even a quick survey of the literature on rights since, for example, the time of the Second World War would reveal a series of puzzling questions to which widely divergent answers have been given: what are rights? Are rights morally fundamental? Are there natural rights? Do human rights exist? Are all the things listed in the UN Universal Declaration (1948) really rights? What are moral rights? Legal rights? Are fundamental moral rights compatible with utilitarianism? How should rights be justified? What is the value of the rights? Can newborns, fetuses, future generations or animals have rights? And so on. The existence of deep philosophical disagreement need not be a cause for alarm or despair; it could, instead, point the way to a fruitful way forward. Thus, one might expect a theory of the character and value of rights to identify at least some crucial issues – on which philosophers are divided – and then outline the main basis of the positions taken. What we would look for is the crux, the hinge on which the issue turns, so that it can be resolved one way or another. A theory arises from a set of problems; it has a context and ultimately reflects a limited purpose. Theories of rights should be regarded, therefore, as partial explications or characterizations rooted in the attempt to resolve some particular crucial question. It is tempting, but misleading, to view the resulting theories as concerned with the nature of rights; it's very... half the paper... it's about what rights we have in the absence of a theory of what makes attributions of rights valid. We might also be led to address the question by a philosophical interest in understanding how and why a set of rights integrates. The task of the kind of theory I am seeking is to provide a general organizing idea or principle that makes sense of rights discourse and explains how and why some ascriptions of rights can be declared valid and others not. Because propositions of rights are a pervasive and controversial issue characteristic of our political practice, the question of what they should mean is a central problem for political theory. Whether we regard them as self-evident truths, or nonsense, or fictions, or something else, we cannot avoid considering their meaning in some way if we are to give an adequate account or criticism of our political principles and institutions...