Rights are entitlements or permissions, usually of a legal or moral nature. Rights are of vital importance in the fields of law and ethics, especially theories of justice and deontology.
[edit] Theoretical distinctions
There are numerous different theoretical distinctions in accordance with which rights may be classified. Not all sources support both sides of every distinction listed here, e.g. Jeremy Bentham denied the existence of natural rights, holding all rights to be of a legal character, and Ayn Rand denied the existence of group rights, holding all rights to be of an individual character.[1]
- Natural rights and legal rights - Legal rights (sometimes also called civil rights or statutory rights) are rights conveyed by a particular polity, codified into legal statutes by some form of legislature (or unenumerated but implied from enumerated rights), and as such are contingent upon local laws, customs, or beliefs. In contrast, natural rights (also called moral rights or inalienable rights) are rights which are not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs of a particular society or polity. Natural rights are thus necessarily universal, whereas legal rights are culturally and politically relative.
- Claim rights and liberty rights - A claim right is a right which entails responsibilities, duties, or obligations on other parties regarding the right-holder. In contrast, a liberty right is a right which does not entail obligations on other parties, but rather only freedom or permission for the right-holder. Liberty rights and claim rights are the inverse of one another: a person has a liberty right permitting him to do something only if there is no other person who has a claim right forbidding him from doing so; and likewise, if a person has a claim right against someone else, that other person's liberty is thus limited. This is because the deontic concepts of obligation and permission are De Morgan dual; a person is permitted to do all and only the things he is not obliged to refrain from, and obliged to do all and only the things he is not permitted to refrain from.
- Negative rights and positive rights - Negative rights require inaction from others (in the sense of rights as claims or entitlements), or permit inaction from the right bearer (in the sense of rights as liberties or permissions). Conversely, positive rights require action from others (in the sense of rights as claims or entitlements) or permit action from the right bearer (in the sense of rights as liberties or permissions).
- Individual rights and group rights - Individual rights are rights pertaining to individuals, regardless of their membership within a group. Group rights, in contrast are held by an ensemble of people collectively, or by the members of a group of people who have a certain characteristic in common. In some cases 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, members of a union may wish to contract with the employer for a wage other than that negotiated by the union, but are unable due to the union's control of the work sphere, sometimes referred to as a "closed shop."
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.
[edit] Areas of concern
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 include labor rights, LGBT 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.
[edit] History of rights and historic documents
The specific enumeration of rights accorded to people has historically differed greatly across space and time, and in many cases, the system of rights promulgated by one group can come into sharp and bitter conflict with that of other groups. In the political sphere, a place in which rights have historically been an important issue, at present the question of who has what legal rights is normally addressed by the constitutions of the respective nations.
Most historical notions of rights were authoritarian and hierarchical, with different people being granted different rights, and some having more rights than others. For instance, the rights of a father to be respected by his son did not indicate a duty upon the father to return that respect, and the divine right of kings to hold absolute power over their subjects did not leave room for many rights to be granted to the subjects themselves.
Modern conceptions of rights often emphasize liberty as among the most important of rights, though conceptions of liberty (e.g. positive vs negative) frequently differ.
The
Magna Carta or "Great Charter" was one of England's first documents containing commitments by a
sovereign to his people to respect certain
legal rights. It reduced the power of the monarch.
- The Magna Carta (1215; England) required the King of England to renounce certain rights and respect certain legal procedures, and to accept that the will of the king could be bound by law.
- The Bill of Rights (1689; England) declared that Englishmen, as embodied by Parliament, possess certain civil and political rights; the Claim of Right (1689; Scotland) was similar but distinct.
- The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789; France) was one of the fundamental documents of the French Revolution, defining a set of individual rights and collective rights of the people.
- The United States Bill of Rights (1789/1791; United States), the first ten amendments of the United States Constitution, was another influential document.
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) is an over-arching set of standards by which governments, organisations and individuals would measure their behaviour towards each other. The preamble declares that the "...recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world..."
- The European Convention on Human Rights (1950; Europe) was adopted under the auspices of the Council of Europe to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms.
- The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) is a follow-up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, concerning civil and political rights.
- The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) is another follow-up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, concerning economic, social and cultural rights.
- The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982; Canada) was created to protect the rights of Canadian citizens from actions and policies of all levels of government.
- The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000) is one of the most recent proposed legal instruments concerning human rights.
[edit] Notable people
Lists
Individuals
[edit] See also
[edit] References
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