Replying to Halpin and Kramer: Agreements, Disagreements and No-Agreements

Abstract

The article considers in detail one criticism of an earlier paper of ours advanced by both Matthew Kramer and Andrew Halpin. This is the criticism that the content of deontic statuses (such as rights and duties) does not shift but is identical in truly correlatively-related deontic statuses. We argue that the content does shift in both our scheme and in Hohfeld's scheme for the logic of rights, and that such shifts are both good things and consistent with correlativity, properly understood. Miscellaneous other criticisms are also discussed, albeit more briefly.