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The concept of a right is fundamental to moral, political, and legal thinking, but much of the use of that concept is selective and fragmentary: it is common merely to appeal to this or that intuitively plausible attribution of rights as needed for purposes of argument. In The Realm of Rights Judith Thomson provides a full-scale, systematic theory of human and social rights, bringing out what in general makes an attribution of a right true.

Thomson says that the question what it is to have a right precedes the question which rights we have, and she therefore begins by asking...

Moral theory should be simple: the moral theorist attends to ordinary human action to explain what makes some acts right and others wrong, and we need no microscope to observe a human act. Yet no moral theory that is simple captures all of the morally relevant facts.

In a set of vivid examples, stories, and cases Judith Thomson shows just how wide an array of moral considerations bears on all but the simplest of problems. She is a philosophical analyst of the highest caliber who can tease a multitude of implications out of the story of a mere bit of eavesdropping. She is also...

His life as a dashing young courtier long since jettisoned by scandal and intrigue, Philip Devalle finds himself caught in a dangerous alliance with the scheming Earl of Shaftesbury. Lying broken and defeated in the infamous confines of the Bastille, Philip vows to make his enemies pay.

But the Bastille changes a man.

In his desire to hurt those who have hurt him he is in danger of losing sight of the person he once was. Can he ever be that person again? Older, wiser and disillusioned with everything for which he once yearned, Philip finds himself forced to confront the realities of...

Stifled by his turbulent provincial family and repressive schooling, Philip Devalle yearns for the power and excitement of life at the court of King Charles II. Escaping to the pleasures and perils of Restoration London, he soon discovers that the glamour of courtly life is not all it seems.

The frivolous facade conceals a sinister reality of subterfuge and corruption. Philip finds himself plunged into a world where amorous alliances and dalliances are more than matched by lusts of a different kind-for power, for survival, for bloodshed.

As Philip rises to prominence and becomes...

How should we live? What do we owe to other people? In Goodness and Advice, the eminent philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson explores how we should go about answering such fundamental questions. In doing so, she makes major advances in moral philosophy, pointing to some deep problems for influential moral theories and describing the structure of a new and much more promising theory.

Thomson begins by lamenting the prevalence of the idea that there is an unbridgeable gap between fact and value--that to say something is good, for example, is not to state a fact, but to do...