The Moral Magic Problem in Theories of Rights

Abstract According to a widely accepted thesis, all rights violations wrong the right-holder. According to another widely accepted thesis, rights protect interests. But many conventional rights protect morally trivial interests. Hence, the two theses taken together lead to the puzzling conclusion that one can wrong another by frustrating a trivial interest. In this essay, I first introduce this “moral magic” problem and show why the interest theory of rights has no resources to address it.