Green's Rights Recognition Thesis and Moral Internalism *

Abstract

T. H. Green claimed that ‘rights are made by recognition. There is no right but thinking makes it so’. This ‘rights recognition thesis’ is widely rejected. I argue in this article that, so far from being an idiosyncratic doctrine of 19^th-century British Idealism, the rights recognition thesis implies a compelling conception of rights, and one that, surprisingly, is more in tune with contemporary meta-ethics than are many contemporary rights theories. Green's moral theory, I argue, is a form of the widely embraced doctrine of ‘moral internalism’. Such internalism, conjoined with a generally embraced analysis of rights, leads to some version of the rights recognition thesis.