BEGIN:VCALENDAR PRODID:-//Grails iCalendar plugin//NONSGML Grails iCalendar plugin//EN VERSION:2.0 CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20190523T130217Z DTSTART;TZID=Australia/Sydney:20180830T161500 DTEND;TZID=Australia/Sydney:20180830T171500 SUMMARY:Objective Rights and Epistemic Risks UID:20190721T043224Z-iCalPlugin-Grails@fe80:0:0:0:200:12ff:fe97:4143%2 TZID:Australia/Sydney LOCATION:University of Melbourne\, Melbourne\, Victoria\, Australia\, Australia DESCRIPTION:

This paper argues that our understanding of objective rights must be sensitive to agents&rsquo\; epistemic limitations. On one popular understanding (which I call the `full-information fact-relative' interpretation)\, considerations about ignorance are relevant only to the `subjective permissibility' of an act\, affecting culpability but not whether an act is a rights-violation. Against this view\, I argue that subjective permissibility is not an adequate answer to the problems that agent ignorance poses for the deliberative and distributive roles of moral rights. If rights are to fill the theoretical role assigned to them\, they must issue fact-relative permissions that are at least somewhat sensitive to agents' evidential and epistemic limitations.