Michael S. Green (William & Mary Law School) has posted“Liberties and Absences”: A review of Matthew Kramer’s Rights and Right-Holding: A Philosophical Investigation (17 Jurisprudence __ (forthcoming 2026)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This is a review essay on Matthew Kramer’s Rights and Right-Holding: A Philosophical Investigation (OUP 2024). My main focus is why Kramer believes that the following biconditional obtains, in the sense that the left side is true of all and only the possible worlds in which the right side is true:
A holds a liberty vis-à-vis B that A φ if and only if it is not the case that A has a duty to B not to φ.
One possible argument for why the biconditional obtains, offered by Heidi Hurd and Michael Moore concerning moral liberties, is that a liberty to φ simply is the absence of a duty not to φ. Kramer rejects this absence theory, concerning both moral and legal liberties. But if liberties are not absences of duties, what constitutes them? Although Kramer speaks of what constitutes claim-rights (and their correlative duties), he fails to do the same with liberties (and their correlative no-rights). As a result, his arguments against the Hurd/Moore account miss their mark. Indeed, Kramer leaves it unclear whether he holds a version of the absence theory himself. Because he does not describe what constitutes liberties, he fails to explain why the biconditional obtains—in particular, why A’s liberty vis-à-vis B that A φ cannot coexist with A’s duty to B not to φ.
Highly recommended.