Rights
Claims a person holds that others are obliged to respect — and a dispute about whether such claims exist prior to law or are created by it.
In practice
A contract clause either creates an obligation someone can be held to or it does not. The difference between a right and a stated value is whether anything follows when it is ignored.
The common mistake
Using the word for anything strongly wanted. A right names a claim that binds someone else, and asserting one for every desirable thing weakens the ones that do binding work.
A right is a claim that imposes a duty on someone else. Saying you have a right to something says more than that it would be good for you to have it: it says another party is obliged, and may be compelled.
The main distinctions
Negative and positive. A negative right requires others to refrain — not to kill you, not to interfere. A positive right requires others to provide — healthcare, education, subsistence. Negative rights are cheaper to honor and easier to specify; positive rights have a harder time naming who exactly owes what.
Natural and legal. Natural rights are held simply in virtue of being human, before and independently of any legal system. Locke argued for life, liberty and property on this basis, and the claim is what makes it coherent to say a law is unjust rather than merely unpopular.
Legal rights are created by institutions. Bentham held that this is all there is, calling natural rights nonsense upon stilts — a right without a law to enforce it, on his view, is a wish.
Where they come from
Four families of answer: from human nature and reason, which is natural law; from what rational agents would agree to, the social contract; from the requirements of rational agency, which is Kant's route; or from the fact that recognizing them produces better outcomes, which is the utilitarian reconstruction and the one critics say is too weak to protect anybody.
What rights do
Their function is to resist aggregation. A utilitarian calculation can in principle license sacrificing one person for many. A right blocks the calculation rather than entering it — which is why rights and consequentialism sit uneasily together, and why the language of rights becomes prominent whenever majorities are the threat.
The standing problems
Rights conflict, and nothing in the concept says how to rank them. Their inflation weakens them, since a right asserted for everything desirable becomes a synonym for wanting. And who holds them — animals, future people, the unconscious — is genuinely unsettled. See justice and liberty.
Concept web
Open the full webQuestions
What is a right?
A claim a person holds that imposes a duty on others. It asserts not merely that something would be good but that another party is obliged to act or refrain.
What is the difference between natural and legal rights?
Natural rights are held in virtue of being human, before any law, which is what makes it coherent to call a law unjust. Legal rights are created by institutions, and Bentham held these are the only real ones.
Why do rights conflict with utilitarianism?
Because a right blocks the aggregative calculation rather than entering it. Utilitarian reasoning can license sacrificing one person for many; a right is precisely what rules that out.