Ayn Rand on Rights
Ayn Rand’s brilliance as a writer of political manifestos and her deficiencies as a philosophical analyst are both on display in her 1961 essays on rights. She sides with the angels in favoring negative liberty rights, and she deftly identifies the problem of positive welfare rights when she asks “Who is to pay?” However, her dicta on “rights” invoke an undefined “moral law” that is purportedly known by a “reason” that has no acquaintance with empirical facts. As a result, Rand routinely mistakes her political preferences for philosophical principles and lends her authority to common errors about rights.