Introduction: This article will perform two tasks. First, the main points of Thomas Nagel's argument in “Personal Rights and Public Space” will be briefly outlined. Second, I will examine and discuss the part of your argument that I find most problematic.1. In his article Nagel argues that rights are not simply self-evident and therefore require some good arguments to ground them. Its goal is to establish that rights are justified by status theory. We will see later what he means by this. What primarily concerns Nagel is whether very different rights, for example the right to view and rent pornography and freedom of association in political matters, can be meaningfully linked. His answer is that they can be. Before going further, I will mention that the types of rights discussed in his article are in the form of negative rights. In understanding his overall vision, Nagel wants the reader to think of rights as a kind of status, as mentioned above. Similar to other types of status such as national citizenship, having rights is part of belonging to a type of community and in this case it is a moral community. As such, and unlike legal or political status, rights have a normative basis. That is to say that rights are not created but recognized to every person. Furthermore, its existence does not depend on political or institutional recognition or enforcement, but rather depends only on moral argument. Of course there are institutions such as the United Nations that can enforce them when the need arises, but the assertion of rights does not depend on the practices of those institutions. According to Nagel, rights can be justified with both instruments...... middle of paper... For example, a right a may be able to prevail over another right ba individual level of rights; your right to enjoy doing z your right not to be interfered with your enjoyment of z is “overridden” by my personal property rights in z. But you might ask: can't rights be suspended or limited? For example, is it not permissible to use the death penalty or limit the freedom of a person who has committed a crime? There may be other, perhaps utilitarian, reasons for allowing these things, but it does not follow that these acts are morally justified at the same time. Conclusion: This article has briefly examined the structure of Nagel's overall argument and then outlined and analyzed the part of his argument where it seems inconsistent. Works Cited Thomas Nagel. “Personal rights and public space”. Philosophy and Public Affairs 24, n.2 (1995): 83-107.