Right
A
right is the power or liberty to which one is justly entitled or a thing to which one has a just claim. Rights serve as rules of interaction between people, and, as such, they place constraints and obligations upon the actions of individuals or groups (for example, if one has a
right to life, this means that others do not have the liberty to
murder him; if one has a right to a free
public education, this may impose on someone else the requirement to pay
taxes to pay the costs of that education).
Most modern conceptions of rights are universalist and
egalitarian. The two main modern conceptions of rights are, on the one hand
human rights universally held by all people and not legitimately abridged by any
state, and, on the other hand, rights of
citizens of a particular state or other political entity, usually incorporated into a
constitution or similar document, but sometimes less formally enshrined. (Sometimes rights of this second type are extended to non-citizens within the borders of a state or jurisdiction.) Such rights may be defined in terms of the
Golden Rule ("do unto others as you would have them do unto you"). An individual agrees to respect the rights of others in exchange for the assurance that the others will respect the same rights for him in turn.
By contrast, most pre-modern conceptions of rights were
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.
It is not generally considered necessary that a right should be understood by the holder of that right; thus rights may be recognized on behalf of another, such as
children's rights or the rights of people declared mentally incompetent to understand their rights. However, rights must be understood by
someone in order to have legal existence, so the understanding of rights is a social prerequisite for the existence of rights. Therefore, educational opportunities within society have a close bearing upon the people's ability to erect adequate rights structures.
There are two fundamental controversies surrounding the notion of rights: First, there is the question of the
basis for rights (on what basis can rights be said to exist). Second, there is the question of the
content of rights (what the rights of a person actually are).
In modern English and European systems of
jurisprudence and
law, a
right is the legal or moral entitlement to do or refrain from doing something or to obtain or refrain from obtaining an action, thing or recognition in
civil society. Compare with
duty, referring to behaviour that is expected or required of the citizen, and with
privilege, referring to something that can be conferred and revoked.
The specific enumeration of rights accorded to citizens has historically differed greatly from one century to the next, and from one regime to the next, but nowadays is normally addressed by the
constitutions of the respective nations. Generally speaking (within the English and European systems) a
right corresponds with a complementary
obligation that others have on the same object or realm; for instance if someone has a right on a thing, simultaneously another party or parties have an obligation to do something (or to abstain from doing something) in order to respect that right or to give concrete execution to that right.
Property rights provide a good example:
society recognizes that individuals have
title to particular property as defined by the transaction by which they acquired the property granting the
individual free use and possession of the property. In many cases, especially regarding ideological and similar rights, the obligation depends on the
legal system in its entirety, or on the
state, or on the generical universality of other subjects submitted to the
law.
The
right can therefore be a faculty of doing something, of omitting or refusing to do something or of claiming something. Some interpretations express a typical form of right in the faculty of using something, and this is more often related to the right of ownership of property. The faculty (in all the above mentioned senses) can be originated by a (generical or specific) law, or by a private
contract (which is sometimes exactly defined as a specific law between or among volunteer parties).
Other interpretations consider the right as a sort of
freedom of something or as the object of
justice. One of the definitions of justice is in fact the obligation that the legal
system has toward the individual or toward the collectivity to grant respect or execution to his/her/its right, ordinarily with no need of explicit claim.
Aristotle, in the
Nicomachean Ethics (book five), claims that there is a large difference between written (generalized) justice and what is actually
right for the (specific) individual.
(10-3) "But what obscures the matter is that though what is equitable is just, it is not identical with, but a correction of, that which is just according to law."(10-4) "The reason of this is that every law is laid down in general terms, while there are matters about which it is impossible to speak correctly in general terms. Where, then, it is necessary to speak in general terms, but impossible to do so correctly, the legislator lays down that which holds good for the majority of cases, being quite aware that it does not hold good for all.""The law, indeed, is none the less correctly laid down because of this defect; for the defect lies not in the law, nor in the lawgiver, but in the nature of the subject-matter, being necessarily involved in the very conditions of human action."Rights can be divided into
individual rights, that are held by citizens as individuals (or
corporations) recognised by the legal system, and
collective rights, held by an ensemble of citizens or a subgroup of citizens who have a certain characteristic in common. In some cases there can be an amount of tension between individual and collective rights. In other cases, the view of collective and individual rights held by one group can come into sharp and bitter conflict with the view of rights held by another group. For instance compare
Manifest destiny with
Trail of Tears.
With reference to the object of the right, a common general distinction is among:
*Intellectual rights, which include:
**
Civil rights**
Religious rights**
Rights of opinion *Real rights (from the
Latin word "res", thing), which include:
**
Property rights**Rights of use
**Liberties
See also:
human rights,
exclusive rights,
negative and positive rights.
Particular systems can (or could in the past) include special rights like:
*
Fief rights, which included:
**Economical rights (like the right to collect
taxes)
**Performance rights (like the
jus primae noctis or corvee)
*
Magna Carta (1215; England)
**Required the
king to renounce certain rights and respect certain legal procedures, and to accept that the will of the king could be bound by
law.
*
Bill of Rights 1689 (England)
**Declared that
Englishmen, as embodied by
Parliament, possess certain civil and political rights that can not be taken away.
*
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789; France)
**One of the fundamental documents of the
French Revolution, defining a set of individual rights and collective rights of the people.
*
United States Bill of Rights (1789/1791)
**The first ten amendments of the
United States Constitution.
*
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
**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..."**Other general Declarations from the UN have followed, notably the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989 [
1].
*
European Convention on Human Rights (1950)
**Adopted under the auspices of the
Council of Europe to protect
human rights and fundamental
freedoms.
*
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982)
**Its purpose is to protect rights of
Canadian citizens from actions and policies of all levels of government.
*
Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000)
*
Human rights*
Animal rights*
Gay rights*
Bill of rights*
Jurisprudence*
Law*
Freedom*
Freedom of religion*
Freedom of speech*
Freedom of the press*
Social contract*
Claim (patent)*
"right" in Wiktionary*
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, article by Leif Wenar.
*
Human Rights Watch*
Amnesty International*
Teacher's Rights*
International Freedom of Expression Exchange*
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights*
Comparative Analysis of Human Rights
