## Metadata - Author: [[William A. Edmundson]] - Full Title: An Introduction to Rights - Category: #books ## Highlights - matters of distributive justice and economic equality are now routinely debated in terms of rights rather than (mere) aspirations. People are generally readier to fight to keep what is theirs than to get what is not yet theirs – social psychologists call this the “endowment effect.” ([Location 312](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076L9RK0&location=312)) - Grotius thus invoked three channels by which rights may be known: by a vivid sort of quasi-sensory perception, by a purely intellectual power akin to logical and mathematical reasoning, and by the consensus of testimony in varied places and times. ([Location 395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076L9RK0&location=395)) - Grotius’s three great innovations were: (1) to regard justice as a matter of respecting and exercising individual rights; (2) to separate the study of rights from theology; and (3) to turn political philosophy away from the quest for the ideal form of government by admitting the possibility of different, equally legitimate forms, derived from different peoples’ exercise of rights in differing circumstances. ([Location 423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076L9RK0&location=423)) - Hobbes’s theory exasperates many because it begins with assumptions that have an undeniable appeal: a bracing unsentimentality about human nature, a recognition of natural rights belonging to each and all, and a determination to understand government as resting upon a compact among the governed. Yet Hobbes makes these assumptions yield conclusions that seem to legitimate the severest authoritarianism. ([Location 495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0076L9RK0&location=495))