1. In this essay I want to try out some ideas: about the notion of a right—how it works and the terms of its meaningful application; about a distinction between institutional and noninstitutional rights; in regard to noninstitutional rights, about specific, nonspecific, general, and so-called universal rights; in relation to ‘universal’ institutional rights, about the notions of ‘natural’ and ‘human’ rights; about certain classes of noninstitutional rights which are variously regarded as basic, fundamental, inalienable, etc.; and about certain problems concerning (...) what is sometimes referred to as the metaphysics of rights: problems about their reality or existence, their eternality or historicity. Throughout I shall feel quite free to move back and forth between so-called analytical questions about rights and questions of a more substantive nature. I shall be aiming both at a clarification of my thinking about rights and at a determination of those noninstitutional rights which, in my book, are to be taken most seriously. This essay is thus written, in the first instance, for my own edification. To others I offer it as an invitation to colloquy and to further reflection. But such colloquies and reflections will not serve their purpose unless they are funded back into the practical deliberations and decisions of ordinary life. (shrink)