Human Rights and Human Well-Being

In this book, William J. Talbott examines the meaning of moral progress, claiming that improvements to our moral or legal practices are changes that, when evaluated as a practice, contribute to equitably promoting well-being. Talbott completes the project begun in his 2005 book of identifying the human rights that should be universal and identifies a list of fourteen robust, inalienable human rights.

William J. Talbott is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington, where he has been teaching since 1989. He has published articles in moral and political philosophy, especially the philosophy of human rights, philosophy of law, epistemology, and rational choice theory. This is the second of two volumes on human rights. The first was Which Rights Should Be Universal? (OUP, 2005).