Rights are deemed to be
inalienable. However, in practice this is often taken as
graded absolutism, as rights are ranked by their degree of importance, and violations of less important rights are accepted in the course of preventing violations of more important ones. Even if the right to not be killed is inalienable, the corresponding obligation on others to refrain from killing generally has at least one exception:
self-defense. Certain widely accepted negative obligations (such as the obligations to refrain from theft, murder, etc.) are often considered
prima facie, meaning that the legitimacy of the obligation is accepted "on its face"; but even if not questioned, such obligations may still be ranked for ethical analysis. Most modern societies insist that other ethical questions need to come into play before stealing can justify killing. Due to being universally regarded as one of the highest obligations, the obligation not to kill is significantly greater than the obligation not to steal. This is why a breach of the latter does not justify a breach of the former.
Positive obligations confer duty. In ethics, positive obligations are almost never considered
prima facie. The greatest negative obligation may have just one exception—one higher obligation of self-defense. However, even the greatest positive obligations generally require more complex ethical analysis. For example, one could easily justify failing to help, not just one, but several injured children quite ethically, in the case of
triage after a disaster. This consideration has led ethicists to agree in a general way that positive obligations are usually junior to negative obligations, as they are not reliably
prima facie. Some critics of positive rights implicitly suggest that because positive obligations are not reliably
prima facie, they must always be agreed to through contract. Nineteenth-century philosopher
Frédéric Bastiat summarized the conflict between these negative and positive rights by saying: {{quote|M. de Lamartine wrote me one day: "Your doctrine is only the half of my program; you have stopped at liberty; I go on to fraternity." I answered him: "The second half of your program will destroy the first half." And, in fact, it is quite impossible for me to separate the word "fraternity" from the word "voluntary." It is quite impossible for me to conceive of fraternity as legally enforced, without liberty being legally destroyed, and justice being legally trampled underfoot.
Libertarians hold that positive rights, which would include a right to be protected, do not exist until they are created by a contract. However, those with this view do not mean that police, for example, are not obligated to protect the rights of citizens. Since they contract with their employers to defend citizens from violence, then they have created that obligation to their employer. A negative right to life may allow an individual to defend his life from others trying to kill him, or obtain voluntary assistance from others to defend his life. Other advocates of the view that there is a distinction between negative and positive rights argue that the presence of a police force or army is not due to any positive right to these services that citizens claim, but rather because they are
natural monopolies or
public goods. These are features of any human society that arise naturally, even while adhering to the concept of negative rights only.
Robert Nozick discusses this idea at length in his book
Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The
Soviet Union criticized the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights according to
Marxism–Leninism for prioritizing negative rights over positive rights.
In medicine In the field of
medicine, positive rights of
patients often conflict with negative rights of
physicians. In controversial areas such as
abortion and
assisted suicide, medical professionals may not wish to offer certain services for moral or philosophical reasons. If enough practitioners opt out as a result of conscience, a right granted by the conscience clause statutes in many jurisdictions (see
Conscientious objection to abortion and
Conscience clause in medicine in the United States), patients may not have any means of having their own positive rights fulfilled. This was the case of
Janet Murdock, a Montana woman who could not find any physician to assist in her suicide in 2009. This controversy over positive and negative rights in medicine has seen an ongoing public debate between conservative ethicist
Wesley J. Smith and bioethicist
Jacob M. Appel. In discussing
Baxter v. Montana, Appel has written: Smith replies that this is "taking the duty to die and transforming it into a duty to kill", which he argues "reflects a profound misunderstanding of the government's role". ==Criticism==