Rights, Violations, and Reasonable Mistakes

Promising, consenting, and even attacking someone are ways to ’rewrite’ our rights, permitting others to treat us in ways that would otherwise have violated the duties they owe us. When unsure whether such a change has been made, we face ’normative opacity’. Incorrect guesses cause injurious mistakes, thus requiring an urgent assessment of the responsibility we have to each other in responding to normative opacity. Rewriting Rights highlights the social dimension of this question: at scale, any bias in the error tendencies of the rules we use yields uneven distributions of actual harm. At the individual level this problem is intractable: we can’t do better than responsibly following our best evidence, even when this predictably leads us to make mistakes that injure marginalised groups-in particular women and Black men-at disproportionate rates. Analogizing the problem to safe driving, J rgensen argues that we must coordinate to adequately control the risks we pose to each other.

The book’s main project is to construct and defend a standard for navigating uncertainty about rights-changes that is not overly demanding but avoids compounding extant gender and racial bias. It offers a characterization that is essentially social, mediated by convention, and communicated through social signals. J rgensen argues that when carefully constrained, social norms can significantly resolve normative opacity-and urges that it is only by recognizing this that we can reform the unjust norms that shape our conception of which mistakes are reasonable.

RenÃ(c)e Jorgensen

Renée Jorgensen is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prior to joining Michigan, she held a faculty position in the Center for Human Values and the Department of Politics at Princeton University, and she was a postdoctoral scholar at Australian National University. Jorgensen has also held visiting positions at Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics and Australian Catholic University’s Dianoia Institute of Philosophy. She completed her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Southern California. Her work is situated in contemporary political, social, and legal philosophy.