Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights - Softcover

Prominent Lawyer Alan Dershowitz delivers an original, thought-provoking and controversial examination of the age-old legal debate - what is the source of our human rights? This is a wholly new and compelling answer to one of the most persistent dilemmas in both law and moral philosophy: If rights are 'natural', where do theses rights come from: Does natural law really exist outside the formal structure of humanly enacted law: On the other hand, if rights are nothing more than the product of human law, what argument is there for allowing the 'rights' of a few people to outweigh the preferences of the majority? In this book, renowned legal scholar Alan Dershowitz offers a fresh resolution to this age-old debate. Rights, he argues, do not come from God, nature, logic or law alone. They arise out of particular experiences with injustice. While justice is an elusive concept, hard to define and subject to conflicting interpretations, injustice is immediate, intuitive, widely agreed upon and very tangible. This timely book will have an immediate impact on political dialogue, from the intersection of religion and law to quandaries surrounding the right to privacy, voting rights and more. It is also a passionate case for the recognition of human rights in a rigorously secular framework. Rights from Wrongs is the first book to propose a theory of rights that emerges not from some theory of perfect justice but from its opposite: from the bottom up, from trial and error, and from our collective experience of injustice.