Title: Rational Rights
Author: Hillel Steiner
Page: 3-11

Abstract: A rational moral code must satisfy the condition of completeness. This same condition applies to a set of moral rights, where it takes the form of requiring that all the rights in that set be compossible: that their respective correlatively entailed duties be jointly fulfillable. Such joint fulfillability is guaranteed only by a set of fully differentiated individual domains. And if moral rights are to play any independent role in moral reasoning - any role logically independent of the values that bring persons into conflict - those domains must be determined by rules which are not derived from those values.

Title: Liberalism and Nationalism
Author: Hillel Steiner
Page: 12-20

Abstract: Historically, liberal political philosophy has had much to say about who is entitled to nationhood. But it has had rather less to say about how to determine the legitimate territorial boundaries of nations and even less to say about what some such nations, so situated, might owe to others. The object of this paper is to show that the foundational principles of liberalism can generate reasonably determinate solutions to these problems. That is, the very same set of basic rights that liberalism ascribes to all persons is itself sufficient to determine which nations they are members of, where those nations, legitimate legal jurisdictions are located, and what amounts of wealth they each owe or are owed by other nations.

Title: Steiner's Justice
Author: Ulrich Steinvorth
Page: 21-34

Abstract: Hillel Steiner is a libertarian who takes the equal right to natural resources seriously. Though there are objections to some of the conclusions he draws from this right, his approach might avoid the vices of liberalism and socialism and combine their virtues.

Title: Rights and Distributive Economic Justice
Author: Rex Martin
Page: 35-51

Abstract: The paper has three main sections. The first is concerned with developing the idea of a democratic system of rights. The second section turns, then, to constructing an idea of economic justice suitable to such a system. The paper concludes, in its final section, with a brief reflection on and assessment of the general line of argument taken.

Title: Libertarian Rights within Pluralistic Consequentialism
Author: Guido Pincione
Page: 52-66

Abstract: This essay questions the self-sufficiency of abstract, non-consequentialist, principles as a defence of a libertarian regime. The argument focuses on the difficulties involved in attempts to defend the priority of negative rights if an attractive conception of freedom and an agent-relative view about our reasons to respect rights are to be upheld. The paper closes by suggesting how libertarianism could gain support from various, and perhaps mutually irreducible and even conflicting, considerations in a wide consequentialist system.

Title: Communitarianism and Collective Rights
Author: Horacio Spector
Page: 67-92

Abstract: The article distinguishes metaphysical from practical communitarianism. Metaphysical communitarianism is alleged to involve a concealed ideological element, which leads its adherents to stereotypes when trying to capture the essence of the modem self. The claim is examined that minorities, or other ethnic and cultural groups have collective rights, either moral or legal in nature. Justifications of collective rights resorting to the value of cultural identity are said to be in need of explaining why the case protecting such value is through rights. It is argued that practical communitarianism's case for collective rights needs embracing meta-normative and normative relativism, whose application to political action yields consequences at odds with widespread ethical intuitions.

Title: Rights, Equality and Procreation
Author: Paula Casal / Andrew Williams
Page: 93-116

Abstract: Individual decisions about how to exercise the legal right to procreative liberty may generate either positive or negative externalities. From within a resource egalitarian perspective, such as that of Ronald Dworkin, it can be argued that procreative justice is asymmetric in the following respect. Justice need not require that parents be subsidised if they produce a public good, yet its ideal achievement may require their activities be taxed if they threaten to produce a public bad.