evidence: A first problem in this regard is the lack of detail concerning Paine’s attempt to justify the existence of human rights, and their priority to duties generally and to duties to collective goods particularly. Lamb repeatedly claims that both human rights and their priority over other concerns (such as virtue, which Paine happily embraced) flow from human equality. Yet it is unclear why they do so. All humans could be equal in their possession of no rights, or in the priority of their duties to their rights, and indeed it was much more common to reach both those conclusions within egalitarian traditions before (indeed during) the eighteenth century. Lamb proceeds immediately to the important fact that Paine deduced the necessity of consent to government from the existence and priority of individual rights, and — though he briefly flirts with assigning to Paine an interest-based approach to basic entitlements — returns only late in the book to the fact that Paine’s justification of them in the first place was essentially theistic (and not very theologically sophisticated for that matter).