Taylor's theory does not rely on rights.

A right is a legitimate claim or entitlement to something, the recognition of which is (morally or legally) required of others.

For a moral right the recognition is imposed by moral principles valid for all moral agents.

For a legal right it is imposed by a given system of law on members of the community that the law governs. In a fully developed legal system one is entitled to redress and compensation if one's rights are violated.

Individuals who cannot understand legal rights may still have them (children, the retarded, the insane). [But Taylor seems not to say anything about moral rights for these people; rights seem specific on his view to moral agents]

Animals and plants could easily be given legal rights as well. In fact, some have them: The Endangered Species Act gives certain species populations the legal right to exist. Wilderness legislation in effect gives legal rights to plants and animals existing in the wilderness areas.

It may make sense to give something legal rights even if it has no moral rights.

Moral rights share these features with legal rights:

• a morally legitimate claim or entitlement to something
• which others are morally required to acknowledge
• and which confers upon others the moral duty not to deprive the rights holder of that to which she has a right
• one may make legitimately (in a moral sense) demand that the claim be respected.

The moral legitimacy of a claim and the moral justifiablity of one's demand that the claim be respected are rooted in a valid normative ethical system.

Rights claims (a opposed to statements of interests, desires, needs, values, which are empirical) are thus normative, not descriptive. (227-8)

A rights-assertion is true if the principle on which it rests is valid. (229)

[This is wrong, for what if it were improperly derived from the principle?]

Valid moral principles must satisfy the five formal conditions and the one appropriate material condition described in Chapter One.

A rights assertion can be true even in a society that does not recognize the principle on which it is founded.

But rights are based on reciprocity. Each agent says, "I have a duty to abide by the rules out of respect for the rights of others because, like them, I have rights that they must respect by complying with the same rules." (233)

Human rights cover whatever is essential to the realization of personhood. These fall into three categories:

• Subsistence and security rights, including the right to life
• Liberty rights—freedom from positive external constraint in pursuit of one's permissible interests
• Autonomy rights—rights to what is necessary for the development and preservation of an individual's autonomy (capacity for self-determination, goal-setting, creating a life-plan, etc.)

In each category there are both negative rights (rights to noninterference) and positive rights (rights to protection and provision).

Rights are absolute in the sense that they are natural, belonging to persons simply because they are persons—that is, by nature rather than convention.

They are also absolute in the sense of being inalienable. That is, they cannot be taken away, nor can we transfer, surrender or sell them.

Yet all rights are defeasible; that is, there are possible situations in which it is morally right to deny a person what she has a right to. There is a strong presumption against but not an absolute prohibition against infringement upon rights.

Given the account of rights outlined above, it is not logically conceivable for either nonhuman animals or plants to have rights.

However if there are nonhuman animals who are persons, they have rights just as human persons do.

There are four aspects of the concept moral right advocated here that make it conceptually impossible for animals or plants to have moral rights:

• A rights-bearer must be a member of a community of moral agents. Since rights entitle one to press claims against violators (who can only be moral agents), it must be theoretically possible to press these claims. But this is not true or even conceivable of animals and plants [nor of many humans!].
• Possession of rights entails the ability to have self-respect. A being has self-respect when it conceives of itself as a person possessing inherent worth and deserving of equal consideration with all other people. Self-respect entails the ability to make first-person assertions of rights, but it is inconceivable for animals or plants (insofar as they are not persons) to have self-respect in this sense. [Piffle. Use your imagination.] It makes no sense to say of animals or plants either that they have or that they lack self-respect. [Wrong again.]
• Rights-bearers must be able to choose to exercise their rights. But it is not conceivable for animals or plants to do this—especially for autonomy rights.
• Rights-bearers have second-order entitlements in virtue of their moral rights—for instance, that when one's rights are violated, one is entitled to redress and restitution, that one is entitled to have one's rights publicly upheld, etc. These entitlements presuppose the ability to complain, demand redress, etc. on the part of rights-holders and these abilities are inconceivable of animals and plants.

There is, however, a weaker concept of moral right on which it is conceivable for animals and plants to have rights.

The moral principles of Chapter 4 lay down duties owed to living things for their own sakes. It is thus possible to think of living things as having a correlative right to have their good respected.

But they do not have rights in the same way that we do; hence with respect to them it is better not to use rights-talk at all, since we can say all we want to say with just the concepts of inherent worth, good of its own, etc.