Rewriting Rights: Making Reasonable Mistakes in a Social Context

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Renée Jørgensen (Associate Professor, Associate Professor, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)

Rewriting Rights

Making Reasonable Mistakes in a Social Context

Renée Jørgensen (Associate Professor, Associate Professor, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)

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English

Oxford University Press
23 October 2025

Ethics & moral philosophy; Jurisprudence & philosophy of law

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, Jørgensen argues that we must coordinate to adequately control the risks we pose to each other.

The book's main project is to construct and defend a standard for navigating uncertainty about rights-changes that is not overly demanding but avoids compounding extant gender and racial bias. It offers a characterization that is essentially social, mediated by convention, and communicated through social signals. Jørgensen argues that when carefully constrained, social norms can significantly resolve normative opacity-and urges that it is only by recognizing this that we can reform the unjust norms that shape our conception of which mistakes are reasonable.

By: Renée Jørgensen (Associate Professor Associate Professor the University of Michigan Ann Arbor)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 240mm, Width: 160mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 536g
ISBN: 9780192889256
ISBN 10: 0192889257
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 23 October 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Renée Jørgensen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prior to joining Michigan, she held a faculty position in the Center for Human Values and the Department of Politics at Princeton University, and she was a postdoctoral scholar at Australian National University. Jørgensen has also held visiting positions at Harvard University's Safra Center for Ethics and Australian Catholic University's Dianoia Institute of Philosophy. She completed her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Southern California. Her work is situated in contemporary political, social, and legal philosophy.

Reviews for Rewriting Rights: Making Reasonable Mistakes in a Social Context

Rewriting Rights is ""an excellent book[…] It addresses an underdiscussed topic, mistakenly violating other people's rights. Furthermore, it does so by reference to two particularly salient instances - mistakes about other's consenting and mistakes in employing self-defensive force - that are in themselves very much topics of widespread public and philosophical concern, with the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements. Jorgensen is a lucid writer, and the book will be accessible to a great many general readers interested in those issues but without formal philosophical training. […] it is a book that every philosopher interested in these topics will have to engage with. * Robert Goodin, (Emeritus) Professor of Philosophy and Social & Political Theory, Australian National University; founding editor of The Journal of Political Philosophy *