Diritti fantasma? : Considerazioni attuali sulla proliferazione dei soggetti

Within the framework of rights proliferation in the last decades, this article considers the proliferation of subjects in the rhetoric of rights, as seen from both the rights holder and the institutional bodies that claim the rights of others. It particularly focuses on the issues raised by those subjects who cannot personally claim and formulate their own rights (e.g. future generations, embryos, newborns, but also mentally incapable people) and of those subjects who could be able to claim and formulate their own rights, but cannot do so because their very same rights are the dominion of an institution, a church, a state, a community, or the family. The article considers the question from the origins of rights– as connected with the idea of “dominium” and with a rational, autonomous individual holder of rights – up to the well-known debate between will theories and interest theories of rights and, finally, the controversial relationship between personal autonomy and rights in feminist literature.