The notion of rights is ubiquitous in philosophical discourse. As Allen Buchanan put it over thirty years ago, ‘Future historians of moral and political philosophy may well label our period the Age of Rights’.1 This notion is not only popular, but also complex. As the legal scholar W. N. Hohfeld famously suggested, rights are susceptible to multiple interpretations: they can be claims, liberties, powers, or immunities.2 Despite this variation, the consensus view is that the core instance of a right is a claim right.3
In the moral domain, claim rights designate a binary relation between a right-holder and a duty-bearer, where the former stands in a distinctive moral position vis-à-vis the latter.4 While there is controversy as to what, precisely, this distinctive moral position amounts to, the idea that claim rights capture it is seldom put into question.
In this article, I challenge this way of thinking. I argue that the language of claim rights is ill suited for the purpose of picking out a distinctive moral position.5 I show that the notion of a claim right is susceptible to several disambiguations, just as the notion of a right itself is. From this, I conclude that we should either no longer appeal to the concept of a claim right in moral theorizing or rethink its purpose.
The article proceeds as follows. In Section II, I set out two desiderata that a plausible definition of moral claim rights should satisfy. The definition should: (a) capture a distinctive moral position and (b) account for paradigmatic instances of claim rights in our ordinary language. In Section III, I show that the two most prominent accounts of claim rights fail to meet desideratum (b). Of course, the fact that prominent accounts are unsatisfactory does not mean that no satisfactory account could be developed. To support this stronger claim, in Section IV, I offer a systematization of our language of claim rights. I suggest that the greatest common denominator of such language is the idea of empowerment, and show that paradigmatic statements about claim rights track either the justification for certain forms of empowerment (justification rights statements) or empowerment itself and the particular status it confers on individuals (status rights statements).
As I explain in Section V, this twofold connection between claim rights and empowerment reveals that, for structural reasons, our desiderata cannot be jointly satisfied. No notion of claim rights can both capture justification as well as status rights statements and pick out a distinctive moral position. In Section VI, I consider three possible implications of this conclusion. One is that we should abandon the notion of claim rights in moral theorizing. Another, less drastic possibility is that, in light of its disjunctive structure, the notion of claim rights should be given a different purpose. A third possibility, for those not persua

