On kno-rights and no-rights

This article joins a debate over no-right previously conducted with Matthew Kramer and more recently joined by Mark McBride, in defence of Kramer. My disagreement with Kramer centres on his assertion that the relationship between claim-right and no-right involves logical duals rather than contradictories, as Hohfeld proposed. That position is tied to Kramer’s view that no-right and liberty must have the same content as correlatives. McBride has attacked my rejection of Kramer’s use of duals as being erroneous and an impediment to understanding the Hohfeldian analytical framework, including the role of correlativity. I reject here McBride’s efforts to technically rescue Kramer’s use of duals and to vindicate that use as being essential for an intelligible explanation of the complete Hohfeldian framework. I argue that the representation of claim-right and no-right as duals remains erroneous, making the Hohfeldian framework unworkable. Within that argument, I draw attention to the distinct concepts of Hohfeldian no-right and Kramerian kno-right; question the complicated steps introduced by McBride to establish a test demonstrating the duality of kno-right; and, taking kno-right and two instances of no-rights as distinct positions on a deontic hexagon, demonstrate the inability of kno-right to operate within a framework of Hohfeldian correlatives.