When liberties are naked, a person may be free to do as he wishes, but others are similarly free to interfere with his actions. As Hillel Steiner has observed: "Like other naked things, unvested liberties are exposed tot he numbing cold effects of cold fronts: in the case of liberties, to the obstructive impact of others' exercise of their powers and liberties."[1] Liberty (capital "L") requires the protection of "liberties" (small "l"),[2] but given that the world is one of subjective scarcity, not all liberties or freedom can be protected, however nice that would be. Rights are concepts that define a domain within which persons ought to be at liberty or free to do as they please free of interference by others.[3] In this sense "No one ever has a right to do something; he only has a right that some one else shall do "or refrain from doing) something. In other words, every right in the strict sense relates to the conduct of another."[4]

The liberal conception of justice is the respect of rights.[5] Some rights are natural in so far as the domains they define are prerequisites for the pursuit of happiness, peace, and prosperity in light of the nature of persons and the world in which they live. In Chapter 3 it was seen that addressing the pervasive problem of knowledge requires an order of actions that is achieved by two components: decentralized jurisdictions and consensual transfers of jurisdiction. In Chapter 1, I discussed how a structure of liberty is needed to facilitate freedom of action and also to constrain it. In the next section, I explain how the rights recognized by the liberal conception of justice facilitate the freedoms described by these two components. After that, I explain how these rights also provide constraints on the actions that people may "rightfully" take. Bear in mind, however, that the case for recognizing such rights does not rest solely on their ability to address the first-order problem of knowledge. As we shall see in Parts II and III, these same rights (and more) are also needed to address the pervasive problems of interest and power.

[1] See Steiner, Essay on Rights, p. 87. Adopting H.L.A. Hart's refinement of the Benthamite distinction between naked and vested liberties, Steiner defines a "vested liberty [as] one surrounded by a 'protective perimeter' formed by others' duties which, though not specifically correlative to any right in the liberty-holder to exercise that liberty, nonetheless effectively prohibit their interference." Ibid. 75.Return

[2] Because of the confusion that may arise from distinguishing Liberty from liberties, classical liberals sometimes distinguish between Liberty (meaning those liberties that are protected) and Freedom (meaning all liberties whether protected of not). See e.g., ibid. 60 n. 4: "Liberty in this normative or evaluative or rule-constituted sense, is to be distinguished from the descriptive or empirical concept­absence of prevention­which … I shall henceforth refer to as 'freedom' where confusion between the two might otherwise occur." I shall do the same.Return

[3]See ibid. 76: "A vested liberty is internal to a person's rights-contained by them because protected by their correlative duties-while a naked liberty is interstitial to respective persons' rights, suspended in whatever action-space is left between the,. Vested liberties exist in one-man's land; naked liberties inhabit no-man's land.".Return

[4] Glanville Williams, "The Concept of Legal Liberty," in Robert Summers (ed.), Essays in Legal Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), p. 139.Return

[5] See Steiner, Essay on Rights, p. 109: "[M]oral reasoning is reasoning about moral actions. And moral actions are ones directed towards our various ends which we believe should be pursued and sustained by everyone and ought not to be obstructed or abolished by anyone. One such and may be justice: the requirement that moral rights be respected."Return