In-Person | Three Truths About Rights Everybody Knew Yesterday

Speaker: Prof. Dr. Markus Stepanians (Universität Bern)
Chair: Dr. Mark Dsouza (UCL)

About the talk

This is a gentle reminder of three truths that were widely accepted once but are now in danger of being forgotten. Prof. Stepanians calls the first ‘Justinian’s truth’ because its most influential expression is that of the Roman Emperor Justinian in his Corpus Iuris Civilis at the beginning of the 6th century CE. It says that rights derive from principles of justice and must be explained in terms of them. Markus associates his second truth with Wesley Hohfeld, who has given it its clearest expression. Hohfeld’s truth says that there is no such thing as ‘the’ concept of a right in a generic sense. There is only an irreducible variety of clearly distinct types of rights, each sui generis. The third truth he would like to rescue from pending oblivion is Frege’s ‘context principle’, which bids us “never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a sentence.” Hart once called it “the beginning of wisdom, though not the end” in the analysis of legal concepts and emphasized its methodological importance throughout his career.

About the speaker

Markus started out as a theoretical philosopher with a special interest in the philosophy of logic and language. After his PhD thesis ‘Frege and Husserl on Thinking and Judging” (published in 1998 in German), he changed horses in midstream and turned to legal and political philosophy. Markus' ‘Habilitation’ thesis from 2005 on ‘Rights as relational properties – in defense of rights/duty-correlativity’ was never published, and in a way he has tried to rework it ever since. Another main interest of his is the philosophy of liberalism and John Stuart Mill. Markus is currently associate professor of political and legal philosophy at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

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Photo by Tom Keldenich on Unsplash