Rights: Facts, Evidence, or Beliefs?

ABSTRACT This paper considers whether rights hold due to the facts, the best available evidence to people, or people's actual beliefs. While there has been much discussion of this question in the context of what we ought to do, there is less discussion from a rights standpoint. This is a shame, since rights are often thought to be relational in a way that is not true of ought, and this relationality causes complications when prospective right‐holders' and duty‐bearers' epistemic perspectives differ from one another. While the paper begins with a thorny problem for the view on which rights depend on the facts, it ultimately argues we have the most reason to endorse such a view.