Rewriting Rights: Making Reasonable Mistakes in a Social Context

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,...