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Rights

Modern political theory locates the notion of “rights” at the center of its debates. The liberal state and constitutional theory have emphasized rights as fundamental building blocks of the social order. In political thought, after a long lull, rights are once again a renewed focus of interest. Political theorists now commonly opt to articulate social demands in terms of rights rather than (for instance) as a general utility or integrity of the body politic. In this vein, several theorists—above all, those with liberal roots—have adopted the Lockean vision of the just political order whose primary obligation is to respect the moral rights of its citizens.

However, there is a broad spectrum of definition for the concept of rights. In its older, objective usage, a right means “what is just” or “what is fair.” Aristotle, for instance, used dikaion to indicate that a society is rightly ordered. However, this “objective” sense of right is not equivalent to our modern, subjective notion of rights, which originates, according to historians, in the thought of John Locke in the 18th century—or perhaps even further back, in late-medieval European thinking. In this subjective sense, rights are sometimes defined as “normative attributes” that pertain to persons. Other approaches see rights as entitlements to choose, entitlements (not) to perform certain actions, or entitlements to expect that others will (not) perform certain actions.

This entry defines a right as a legal or moral recognition of choices or interests to which a particular weight is attached. It proceeds in three steps. The first section elucidates the different types of rights and the second section the forms and functions of rights. The final section delivers a brief overview of the major theories of rights.

Types of Rights

Any study of rights should begin with an elucidation of the multiple categories of rights. In the realm of politics, one can distinguish between legal and moral rights, between rights as such and “human rights,” and between civil, political, social, and cultural rights.

Legal and Moral Rights

Legal rights describe a type of institutional arrangement in which interests are guaranteed legal protection, choices are guaranteed legal effect or goods, and opportunities are provided to individuals on a guaranteed basis. Assertions that X has a legal right to Y are tested according to whether the law does in fact recognize and implement X's right to Y.

Moral rights express the justified demand that such institutional arrangements should be implemented, maintained in the name of a fundamental principle that accords importance to certain basic individual values such as autonomy or moral agency. The assertion that X has a moral right in the absence of any legal recognition of this right may take the form of a demand for the law to be changed.

Natural rights can be considered as a subclass of moral rights. These are fundamental rights, derived from nature or divine authority, and enjoyed by all men and women regardless of their beliefs and position in society. They pertain to human beings in the state of nature, prior to the institution of society. Natural rights are thus considered to precede civic rights held in the political order. They are therefore universal, inalienable, and indefeasible: They cannot be contested by political authority, and indeed, it is the responsibility of those who govern to protect them. Consequently, the concept was used to justify the revolutions of the 18th century on the grounds that the existing law infringed on individuals' natural rights. In the United States, for instance, the Declaration of Independence (1776) against the British colonial state was based on an appeal to the natural rights of all Americans. The Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen (Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1789) also refers to certain “natural rights” of mankind.

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