LESSON 7:
MEANING AND TYPES OF RIGHTS
Dear students, today we will learn about rights.
Points to be covered in this lesson:
• Concept of a right
• Types of rights
The concept of a “right.” obviously appears in many of the
moral argu-ments and moral-claims invoked in business
discussions. Employees, for ex-ample, argue that they have a
“right to equal pay for equal work”; managers assert that unions
violate their “right to manage”; investors complain that tax- ation
violates their “property rights”; consumers claim that they have a
“right to know.” Moreover, public documents often employ the
notion of a right.
In 1948 the United Nations adopted a “Universal Declaration of
Human Rights,” which claimed that “all human beings” are
entitled, among other things, to:
• The right to own property alone as well as in association
with others.
• The right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and
favorable conditions of work, and to protection against
unemployment.
• The right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for
[the worker] and his family an existence worthy of human
dignity . . .
• The right to form and to join trade unions . . . the right to
rest and leisure. including reasonable limitation of working
hours and periodic holidays with pay. .
The concept of a right and the correlative notion of duty, then, lie
at the heart of much of our moral discourse. This section is
intended to provide an understanding of these concepts and of
some of the major kinds of ethical principles and methods of
analysis that underlie their use.
But what do we actually mean by right? Lets try to understand
this term in a much better way.
The Concept of a Right
A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s
freedom of action in a social context. - Ayn Rand
Individual rights state explicitly the requirements for a person to
benefit rather than suffer from living in a society. They codify
man’s protection from the initiation of force, as required by his
rational nature. Being required by man’s rational nature, rights are
not arbitrary or negotiable. They are absolute requirements for life
within a society. Rights are absolute.
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Right to Life
The right to life is the fundamental right, of which all other
rights are corollaries. The right to life states that you own your
own body. It is your property to do with as you please. No one
may force you to do anything, no one may injure you in any way,
and above all, no one may take your life (without consent).
The opposite to the right to life is life as a slave, where someone
or some people essentially own you — they can dictate what
you do, when you do it, and take your life if they please.
It should be noted that rights are guarantees to freedom of
actions. They do not provide for anything but freedom of
action. There is no right to food, for example; only the right to
work and keep the proceeds with which you may buy food.
Right to Liberty
The right to liberty is a part of the right to life, specifically
referring to your freedom of action. You may do what you
want, when you want, provided you don’t trample on the rights
of anyone else. This is a necessity for man’s life because man’s
means of survival is reason. Survival by reason requires that you
are able to act upon your reason otherwise your reason is of no
avail. You can only act on your reason if you are free from the
coercion of others.
If society were to permit some actions and not others, it would
be permitting some reason and not other reason. It would be
effectively destroying individual reason by making reason second
place to some other standard. When a society prevents its
citizens from the initiation of force, however, it is not
circumventing reason, because there is never a reason for the
initiation of force.
Right to Property
Property rights are an extension to the right to life. In order to
support yourself through reason and stay alive, you must be
able to own and use the product of your labor. If the tools of
your survival are subject to random confiscation, then your life
is subject to random destruction.
Right to the Pursuit of Happiness
The right to the pursuit of happiness is freedom of action. To
live, man must achieve values. To achieve values, man must be
free to think and act. The right to the pursuit of happiness
means a man is free to do anything he pleases, as long as it
doesn’t conflict with the rights of others. Since man must use
his own mind to live, he must be able to choose his values and
act towards them. Even acts which are destructive to himself
must be allowed, or a man cannot live by his own mind.
Ultimately, man must be free to pursue his own goals and
happiness.
Right to Free Speech
The right to free speech is a recognition that speech in itself if
devoid of physical threats is not an initiation of force and does
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not warrant any retaliatory force. Many dictatorships and People’s
States will outlaw certain types of speech as being dangerous or
inflammatory or against the will of the people, but this
censorship is just an evasion of reality - hoping that if a problem
is ignored it will go away. Freedom of speech is required for
liberty because without the freedom of speech, you cannot
persuade others of what is right and what is wrong. Without the
freedom to persuade others, only force can make people act in a
particular way. It is an important check on government because it
allows transgressions to be identified and fixed rather than
hidden and perpetuated.
Right to Self Defense
The right to defend yourself is a corollary to the right to life. You
must be able to protect what is yours when it is threatened. If you
are being attacked the situation leaves the realm of morality - it
leaves the realm of the everyday and becomes an emergency. In
such an emergency, anything goes. That is the choice that your
attacker has made, and he must live with his choice. The
government must maintain the right to bear arms so that self
defense will be possible.
Some say that right is just an individual’s entitlement to do
something. A person has a right when that person is entitled to
act in a certain way or is entitled to have others act in a certain way
toward him or her. But according to Jonah Goldberg : A right is
not an “entitlement.” A right is inalienable, which
means that it cannot be violated by anyone for any reason. It
should not be violated by freelance goons, the Mafia, or even the
government. It cannot be, in good conscience, violated for any
reason: not for “the public good,” or to feed other people. The
price of having rights means respecting those of others.
This is because, if everyone stole, raped, and murdered, then no
one would be safe and no rights would exist. Adhering to the
rights of others is the price of a free society. This is why respecting
the rights of others is integral to having rights of one’s own.
Rights are powerful devices whose main purpose is that of
enabling the individual to choose freely whether to pursue certain
interests or activities and of protecting those choices. In day-to-
day basis we use the term right for all these things:
1. We use the term right to indicate the mere absence of
prohibitions against pursuing some interest or activity.
2. We use the term right to indicate that a person is authorized or
empowered to do something either to secure the interests of
others or to secure one’s interests.
3. The term right is sometimes used to indicate the existence of
prohibitions or requirements on others that enable the
individual to pursue certain interests or activities.
Types of Rights
Legal Rights
The entitlement may derive from legal system that permits or
empowers the person to act in a specified way or that requires
others to act in certain ways toward that person: the entitlement is
then called legal right. Legal rights are limited to the particular
jurisdiction within which legal system is in force.
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Moral Rights
Entitlements can also derive from a system of moral standards
independently of any particular legal system. Moral rights or
human rights are based on moral norms and principles that
specify that all human beings are permitted or empowered to
do something or are entitled to have something done for them.
Moral rights, unlike legal rights, are usually thought of as being
universal insofar as they are rights that all human beings of every
nationality possess to an equal extent simply by virtue of being
human beings. Unlike legal rights, moral rights are not limited to
a particular jurisdiction.
Moral rights are rights that impose prohibitions or require-
ments on others and which thereby enable individuals to choose
freely whether to pursue certain activities or certain interests.
These moral rights identify those activities or interests that the
individual is empowered to pursue, as he or she chooses; and
they protect the individual’s pursuit of those interests and
activities within the boundaries specified by the rights.
The features of Moral Rights are:
1. Moral rights and duties go hand in hand. Students you
should try to understand that if you know your rights then
you have to know your duties also as a responsible citizen.
This is because one person’s moral right generally can be
defined – at least partially in terms of the moral duties other
people have towards that person. To have a moral right
necessarily implies that others have certain duties toward the
bearer of that right. Duties, are generally the other side of
moral rights: If I have a moral right to do something, then
other people have a moral duty not to interfere with me
when I do it.
In some cases, the correlative duties imposed by a right may
fall not on any specific individual but on all the members of
a group. If a person has the right to work, this does not
necessarily mean that any specific employer has a duty to
provide that person with a job.
2. Moral rights provide individuals with autonomy and equality
in the free pursuit of their interests. A right identifies activities
or interests that people must be left free to pursue or not
pursue as they themselves choose and whose pursuit may not
be subordinated to the interests of others except
for special and exceptionally weighty reasons.
3. Moral rights provide a basis for justifying one’s actions and
for invoking the protection or aid of others. If I have a
moral right to do something, then I have a moral
justification for doing that. Moreover, if I have a right to do
something, then others have no justification for interfering
with me.
How Moral Rights are Different from Utilitarianism:
• Moral Rights express the requirements of morality from the
point of view of the individual while utilitarianism
expresses the requirements of morality from the point of
view of society as whole.
• Moral rights promote the individual’s welfare and protect the
individual’s choices against encroachment by society while
utilitarianism expresses the requirements of morality from the
point of view of society as a whole.
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Positive and Negative Rights
Since the concept of rights limits the actions of the govern- ment,
the only way to circumvent them is by adding new rights that are
allegedly superior to the others. The concept of Positive Rights
was developed. These new rights differ from the old rights.
Instead of involving freedom from interference from others,
these new rights demand goods and services.
1. Positive Right is when you have a right to something that
means you can force someone else to provide you with it
2. A Negative Right is when you have a right to something, but
you have to gain/maintain it yourself.
Negative rights is distinguished by the fact that its members can
be defined wholly in terms of the duties others have to not
interfere in certain activities of the person who holds a given
right. On the other hand positive rights do more than impose
negative duties. They also imply that some other agents have the
positive duty of providing the holder of the right with whatever
he or she needs to freely pursue his or her interests. Contractual
Rights and Duties
Contractual rights and duties (sometimes called special rights
and duties or special obligations) are the limited rights and.
correlative duties that arise when one person enters an agree-
ment with another person. For example, if I contract to do
something for you, then you are entitled to my performance:
You acquire a contractual right to whatever I promised, and I
have a contrac-tual duty to perform as I promised.
How Contractual Rights and Duties are Different
from Other Rights and Duties:
Contractual rights and duties are distinguished,
1. Contractual rights are attached to specific individuals and the
correlative duties are imposed only on other specific individual.
If I agree to do something for you, everyone else does not
thereby acquire new rights over me, nor do I acquire any new
duties toward them.
2. Contractual rights arise out of a specific transaction be-tween
particular individuals. Unless I actually make a promise or
enter some other similar arrangement with you, you do not
acquire any contractual rights over me.
3. Contractual rights and duties depend on a publicly accepted
sys-tem of rules that define the transactions that give rise to
those rights and duties. Contract for example, create special
rights and. duties between people only if the people recognize
and accept a system of conventions that speci-fies that by doing
certain things (such as signing a paper) a person undertakes an
obligation to do what he or she agrees to do
Without the institution of contract and the rights and duties it
can create, modem business societies could not operate. Virtually
every business transac-tion at some point requires one
of the parties to rely on the word of the other party to the effect
that the other party will pay later, will deliver certain services
later, or will transfer goods of a certain quality and quantity.
Contractual rights and duties also provide a basis for the special
duties or obligations that people acquire when they accept a
position or a role within a legitimate social institution or an
organization. Married parents, for example, have a special duty
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to care, for the upbringing of their children; doctors have a
special duty to care for the health of their patients; and manag-
ers have a spe-cial duty to care for the organization they
administer.
In each of these cases, there is a publicly accepted institution
(such as a familial, medical, or corpo-rate institution) that
defines a certain position or role (such as parent, doctor, your
manager) on which the welfare of certain vulnerable persons
(such as the parent’s children, the doctor’s patients, the manag-
ers corporate constituencies) depends.
Society attaches to these institutional roles special duties of
caring for these- vulnerable dependents and of protecting them
from injury, duties that the person who enters the role knows he
or she is expected to fulfill. When a person freely enters the role
knowing what duties society attaches to the ac-ceptance of the
role that person in effect enters an agreement to fulfill those
duties.
• So what kind of ethical rules do you think govern contracts.
The system of rules that underlies contractual rights and
duties has been traditionally interpreted as including several
moral constraints:
1. Both of the parties to a contract must have full knowledge
of the nature of the agreement they are entering.
2. Neither party to a contract must intentionally misrepresent
the facts of the contractual situation to other party.
3. Neither party to the contract must be forced to enter the
contract under duress or coercion.
4. The contract must not bind the parties to an immoral act.
Contracts that violate one or more of these four conditions
have traditionally been considered void.
Overview
• A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a
man’s freedom of action in a social context. Rights are
absolute.
• The price of having rights means respecting those of others.
Activity
Briefly discuss moral rights. How are moral rights different
from utilitarianism?
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