Abstract

This paper is an attempt to investigate a new indirect strategy in order to justify the concepts of prenatal and posthumous rights. Instead of providing positive reasons for recognizing rights without actually living rightholders, I sketch an analogical argument inspired by the famous Lucretian symmetry thesis. It relies on similarities between the major objections raised against rights for past and future people. The provisional examination suggests that there is only one direction for a convincing symmetry – surprisingly, it is the inversion of the one casually relied on by the literature: if we start recognizing prenatal rights, we should recognize their posthumous counterparts likewise.