Natural versus legal or
nature. •
Natural rights are rights which are "natural" in the sense of "not artificial, not man-made", as in rights deriving from
human nature or from the
edicts of a god. They are universal; that is, they apply to all people, and do not derive from the laws of any specific society. They exist necessarily, inhere in every individual, and cannot be taken away. For example, it has been argued that humans have a natural
right to life. These are sometimes called
moral rights or
inalienable rights. •
Legal rights, in contrast, are based on a society's customs, laws,
statutes or actions by
legislatures. An example of a legal right is the
right to vote of citizens.
Citizenship, itself, is often considered as the basis for having legal rights, and has been defined as the "right to have rights". Legal rights are sometimes called
civil rights or
statutory rights and are culturally and politically
relative since they depend on a specific societal context to have meaning. Some thinkers see rights in only one sense while others accept that both senses have a measure of validity. There has been considerable philosophical debate about these senses throughout history. For example,
Jeremy Bentham believed that legal rights were the essence of rights, and he denied the existence of natural rights, whereas
Thomas Aquinas held that rights purported by
positive law but not grounded in
natural law were not properly rights at all, but only a facade or pretense of rights.
Claim versus liberty • A
claim right is a right which entails that another person has a duty to the right-holder. Somebody else must do or refrain from doing something to or for the
claim holder, such as perform a service or supply a product for him or her; that is, he or she has a
claim to that service or product (another term is
thing in action). In logic, this idea can be expressed as: "Person
A has a claim that person
B do something if and only if
B has a duty to
A to do that something." Every claim-right entails that some other duty-bearer must do some duty for the claim to be satisfied. This duty can be to act or to refrain from acting. For example, many jurisdictions recognize broad claim rights to things like "life, liberty, and property"; these rights impose an obligation upon others
not to assault or restrain a person, or use their property, without the claim-holder's permission. Likewise, in jurisdictions where social welfare services are guaranteed, citizens have legal claim rights to be provided with those services. • A
liberty right or
privilege, in contrast, is simply a freedom or permission for the right-holder to do something, and there are
no obligations on other parties to do or not do anything. Though similarly named, positive and negative rights should not be confused with
active rights (which encompass "privileges" and "powers") and
passive rights (which encompass "claims" and "immunities").
Individual versus group •
Individual rights are rights held by individual people regardless of their group membership or lack thereof. , the group becomes like an organism in itself and has
rights which trump the rights of any individual soldier. •
Group rights, including the rights of
nations, have been argued to exist when a group is seen as more than a mere composite or assembly of separate individuals but an entity in its own right. In other words, it is possible to see a group as a distinct being in and of itself; it is akin to an enlarged individual, a corporate body, which has a distinct will and power of action and can be thought of as having
rights. Rights of nations, including a national
right to self-determination have been argued for, and a platoon of soldiers in
combat can be thought of as a distinct group, since individual members are willing to risk their lives for the survival of the group, and therefore the group can be conceived as having a "right" which is superior to that of any individual member; for example, a soldier who disobeys an officer can be punished, perhaps even killed, for a breach of obedience. But there is another sense of group rights in which people who are members of a group can be thought of as having specific individual rights because of their membership in a group. In this sense, the set of rights which individuals-as-group-members have is expanded because of their membership in a group. For example, workers who are members of a group such as a
labor union can be thought of as having expanded individual rights because of their membership in the labor union, such as the rights to specific working conditions or wages. There can be tension between individual and group rights. A classic instance in which group and individual rights clash is conflicts between unions and their members. For example, individual members of a union may wish a wage higher than the union-negotiated wage, but are prevented from making further requests; in a so-called
closed shop which has a
union security agreement, only the union has a
right to decide matters for the individual union members such as wage rates. So, do the supposed "individual rights" of the workers prevail about the proper wage? Or do the "group rights" of the union regarding the proper wage prevail? The
Austrian School of Economics holds that only individuals think, feel, and act whether or not members of any abstract group. The society should thus according to economists of the school be analyzed starting from the individual. This methodology is called
methodological individualism and is used by the economists to justify
individual rights. Similarly, the author
Ayn Rand argued that only individuals have rights, according to her philosophy known as
Objectivism. However, others have argued that there are situations in which a group of persons is thought to have rights, or
group rights.
Other senses Other distinctions between rights draw more on historical association or
family resemblance than on precise philosophical distinctions. These include the distinction between
civil and political rights and
economic, social and cultural rights, between which the articles of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights are often divided. Another conception of rights groups them into
three generations. These distinctions have much overlap with that between
negative and positive rights, as well as between
individual rights and
group rights, but these groupings are not entirely coextensive.
Politics between making an arrest and beginning an interrogation. The warning informs the person arrested that they have rights included in the Fifth Amendment. Failure to "read Miranda" disqualifies evidence obtained primarily in the questioning. Rights are often included in the foundational questions that governments and politics have been designed to deal with. Often the development of these socio-political institutions have formed a dialectical relationship with rights. Rights about particular issues, or the rights of particular groups, are often areas of special concern. Often these concerns arise when rights come into conflict with other legal or moral issues, sometimes even other rights. Issues of concern have historically included
Indigenous rights,
labor rights,
LGBTQ rights,
reproductive rights,
disability rights,
patient rights and
prisoners' rights. With increasing
monitoring and the information society,
information rights, such as the
right to privacy are becoming more important. Some examples of groups whose rights are of particular concern include
animals, and amongst
humans, groups such as
children and
youth,
parents (both
mothers and
fathers), and
men and
women. Accordingly,
politics plays an important role in developing or recognizing the above rights, and the discussion about which behaviors are included as "rights" is an ongoing political topic of importance. The concept of rights varies with political orientation. Positive rights such as a "right to medical care" are emphasized more often by left-leaning thinkers, while right-leaning thinkers place more emphasis on negative rights such as the "right to a fair trial". Further, the term
equality which is often bound up with the meaning of "rights" often depends on one's political orientation.
Conservatives and right-wing
libertarians and advocates of
free markets often identify equality with
equality of opportunity, and want what they perceive as equal and fair rules in the process of making things, while agreeing that sometimes these fair rules lead to unequal outcomes. In contrast,
socialists see the power imbalance of employer-employee relationships in capitalism as a cause of inequality and often see unequal outcomes as a hindrance to equality of opportunity. They tend to identify
equality of outcome as a sign of equality and therefore think that people have a right to portions of necessities such as
health care or
economic assistance or
housing that align with their needs. ==Philosophy==