Rewriting Rights: Making Reasonable Mistakes in a Social Context - Hardcover

Promising, consenting, and even attacking someone are ways to 'rewrite' our rights, permitting others to treat us in ways that would otherwise have violated the duties they owe us. When unsure whether such a change has been made, we face 'normative opacity'. Incorrect guesses cause injurious mistakes, thus requiring an urgent assessment of the responsibility we have to each other in responding to normative opacity. Rewriting Rights highlights the social dimension of this question: at scale, any bias in the error tendencies of the rules we use yields uneven distributions of actual harm. At the individual level this problem is intractable: we can't do better than responsibly following our best evidence, even when this predictably leads us to make mistakes that injure marginalised groups-in particular women and Black men-at disproportionate rates. Analogizing the problem to safe driving, J rgensen argues that we must coordinate to adequately control the risks we pose to each other.