Negative and positive rights
Encyclopedia
Philosophers and political scientists
make a distinction between negative and positive rights
(not to be confused with the distinction between negative and positive liberties). According to this view, positive rights permit or oblige action, whereas negative rights permit or oblige inaction. These permissions or obligations may be of either a legal or moral character. Likewise, the notion of positive and negative rights may be applied to either liberty rights or claim rights
, either permitting one to act or refrain from acting, or obliging others to act or refrain from acting. However, this article and most literature discusses them as applied to the latter sense.
To take an example involving two parties in a court of law
: Adrian has a negative right to x against Clay if and only if
Clay is prohibited from acting upon Adrian in some way regarding x. In contrast, Adrian has a positive right to x against Clay if and only if Clay is obliged to act upon Adrian in some way regarding x. A case in point, if Adrian has a negative right to life against Clay, then Clay is required to refrain from killing Adrian; while if Adrian has a positive right to life against Clay, then Clay is required to act as necessary to preserve the life of Adrian.
Rights considered negative rights may include civil and political rights such as freedom of speech
, private property, freedom from violent crime
, freedom of worship, habeas corpus
, a fair trial
, freedom from slavery
. Rights considered positive rights, as initially proposed in 1979 by the Czech jurist Karel Vasak, may include other civil and political rights such as police
protection of person and property and the right to counsel
, as well as economic, social and cultural rights such as food
, housing
, public education
, employment
, national security
, military
, health care
, social security
, and a minimum standard of living
. In the "three generations"
account of human rights, negative rights are often associated with the first generation of rights, while positive rights are associated with the second and third generations.
Some philosophers (see criticisms) disagree that the negative positive rights distinction is useful or valid.
. A positive right is a right to be subjected to an action of another person or group. In theory, a negative right forbids others from acting against the right holder, while a positive right obligates others to act with respect to the right holder. In the framework of the Kantian
categorical imperative
, negative rights can be associated with perfect duties while positive rights can be connected to imperfect duties.
Belief in a distinction between positive and negative rights is usually maintained, or emphasized, by libertarian
s, who believe that positive rights do not exist until they are created by contract. The United Nations
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
lists both positive and negative rights (but does not identify them as such). The constitutions of most liberal democracies
guarantee negative rights, but not all include positive rights. Nevertheless, positive rights are often guaranteed by other laws, and the majority of liberal democracies provide their citizens with publicly funded education, health care, social security and unemployment benefit
s.
and sometimes even absolute
. However, in practice this is often taken as graded absolutism
; rights are ranked by degree of importance, and violations of lesser ones are accepted in the course of preventing violations of greater ones. Thus, even if the right not to be killed is inalienable, the corresponding obligation on others to refrain from killing is generally understood to have at least one exception: self-defense. Certain widely accepted negative obligations (such as the obligations to refrain from theft, murder, etc.) are often considered prima facie
, meaning that the legitimacy of the obligation is accepted "on its face"; but even if not questioned, such obligations may still be ranked for ethical analysis.
Thus a thief may have a negative obligation not to steal, and a police officer
may have a negative obligation not to tackle people—but a police officer tackling the thief easily meets the burden of proof that he acted justifiably, since his was a breach of a lesser obligation and negated the breach of a greater obligation. Likewise a shopkeeper or other passerby may also meet this burden of proof when tackling the thief. But if any of those individuals pulled a gun and shot the thief for stealing, most modern societies would not accept that the burden of proof had been met. The obligation not to kill—being universally regarded as one of the highest, if not the highest obligation—is so much greater than the obligation not to steal that a breach of the latter does not justify a breach of the former. Most modern societies insist that other, very serious ethical questions need come into play before stealing could justify killing.
Positive obligations confer duty. But as we see with the police officer, exercising a duty may violate negative obligations (e.g. not to overreact and kill). For this reason, in ethics positive obligations are almost never considered prima facie. The greatest negative obligation may have just one exception—one higher obligation of self-defense—but even the greatest positive obligations generally require more complex ethical analysis. For example, one could easily justify failing to help, not just one, but a great many injured children quite ethically in the case of triage
after a disaster. This consideration has led ethicists to agree in a general way that positive obligations are usually junior to negative obligations because they are not reliably prima facie. Critics of positive rights implicitly suggest that because positive obligations are not reliably prima facie they must always be agreed to through contract.
Nineteenth century philosopher Frederic Bastiat
summarized the conflict between these negative and positive rights by saying:
According to Jan Narveson
, the view of some that there is no distinction between negative and positive rights on the ground that negative rights require police and courts for their enforcement is "mistaken." He says that the question between what one has a right to do and who if anybody enforces it are separate issues. If rights are only negative then it simply means no one has a duty to enforce them, although individuals have a right to use any non-forcible means to gain the cooperation of others in protecting those rights. Therefore, he says "the distinction between negative and positive is quite robust." http://www.againstpolitics.com/libertarianism/index.html Libertarians hold that positive rights, which would include a right to be protected, do not exist until they are created by contract. However, those who hold this view do not mean that police, for example, are not obligated to protect the rights of citizens. Since they contract with their employers to defend citizens from violence, then they have created that obligation to their employer. A negative right to life allows an individual to defend his life from others trying to kill him, or obtain voluntary assistance from others to defend his life—but he may not force others to defend him, because he has no natural right to be provided with defense. To force a person to defend one's own negative rights, or the negative rights of a third party, would be to violate that person's negative rights.
Other advocates of the view that there is a distinction between negative and positive rights argue that the presence of a police force or army is not due to any positive right to these services that citizens claim, but rather because they are natural monopolies or public goods—features of any human society that arise naturally, even while adhering to the concept of negative rights only. Robert Nozick
discusses this idea at length in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia
.
, positive rights of patients often conflict with negative rights of physicians. In controversial areas such as abortion
and assisted suicide
, medical professionals may not wish to offer certain services for moral or philosophical reasons. If enough practitioners opt out as a result of conscience, a right granted by conscience clause
statutes in many jurisdictions, patients may not have any means of having their own positive rights fulfilled. Such was the case of Janet Murdock, a Montana woman who could not find any physician to assist her suicide in 2009. This controversy over positive and negative rights in medicine has become a focal part on the ongoing public debate between conservative ethicist Wesley J. Smith
and radical philosopher Jacob M. Appel
. In discussing the case of Baxter v. Montana
, Appel has written: Smith replies that this is "taking the duty to die and transforming it into a duty to kill," which he argues "reflects a profound misunderstanding of the government’s role."
To Shue, rights can always be understood as confronting "standard threats" against humanity. Dealing with standard threats requires all kinds of duties, which may be divided across time (e.g. "if avoiding the harmful behaviour fails, begin to repair the damages"), but also divided across people. The point is that every right provokes all 3 types of behaviour (avoidance, protection, repair) to some degree. Dealing with a threat like murder, for instance, will require one individual to practice avoidance (e.g. the potential murderer must stay calm), others to protect (e.g. the police officer, who must stop the attack, or the bystander, who may be obligated to call the police), and others to repair (e.g. the doctor who must resuscitate a person who has been attacked). Thus, even the so-called "negative right not to be killed" can only be guaranteed with the help of some positive duties. Shue goes further, and maintains that the negative and positive rights distinction can be harmful, because it may result in the neglect of necessary duties.
James P. Sterba makes similar criticisms. He holds that any right can be made to appear either positive or negative depending on the language used to define it. He writes:
Sterba has rephrased the traditional "positive right" to provisions, and put it in the form of a sort of "negative right" not to be prevented from taking the resources on their own, albeit creating a conflict with the traditional negative right of private property. Thus, all rights may not only require both "positive" and "negative" duties, but it seems that rights that do not involve forced labor can be phrased positively or negatively at will. The distinction between positive and negative may not be very useful, or justified, as rights requiring the provision of labor can be rephrased from "right to education" or "right to health care" to "right to take surplus money to pay teachers" or "right to take surplus money to pay doctors".
Political science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
make a distinction between negative and positive rights
Rights
Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement; that is, rights are the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people, according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical theory...
(not to be confused with the distinction between negative and positive liberties). According to this view, positive rights permit or oblige action, whereas negative rights permit or oblige inaction. These permissions or obligations may be of either a legal or moral character. Likewise, the notion of positive and negative rights may be applied to either liberty rights or claim rights
Claim rights and liberty rights
Some philosophers and political scientists make a distinction between claim rights and liberty rights. A claim right is a right which entails responsibilities, duties, or obligations on other parties regarding the right-holder...
, either permitting one to act or refrain from acting, or obliging others to act or refrain from acting. However, this article and most literature discusses them as applied to the latter sense.
To take an example involving two parties in a court of law
Party (law)
A party is a person or group of persons that compose a single entity which can be identified as one for the purposes of the law. Parties include: plaintiff , defendant , petitioner , respondent , cross-complainant A party is a person or group of persons that compose a single entity which can be...
: Adrian has a negative right to x against Clay if and only if
If and only if
In logic and related fields such as mathematics and philosophy, if and only if is a biconditional logical connective between statements....
Clay is prohibited from acting upon Adrian in some way regarding x. In contrast, Adrian has a positive right to x against Clay if and only if Clay is obliged to act upon Adrian in some way regarding x. A case in point, if Adrian has a negative right to life against Clay, then Clay is required to refrain from killing Adrian; while if Adrian has a positive right to life against Clay, then Clay is required to act as necessary to preserve the life of Adrian.
Rights considered negative rights may include civil and political rights such as freedom of speech
Freedom of speech
Freedom of speech is the freedom to speak freely without censorship. The term freedom of expression is sometimes used synonymously, but includes any act of seeking, receiving and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used...
, private property, freedom from violent crime
Violent crime
A violent crime or crime of violence is a crime in which the offender uses or threatens to use violent force upon the victim. This entails both crimes in which the violent act is the objective, such as murder, as well as crimes in which violence is the means to an end, such as robbery. Violent...
, freedom of worship, habeas corpus
Habeas corpus
is a writ, or legal action, through which a prisoner can be released from unlawful detention. The remedy can be sought by the prisoner or by another person coming to his aid. Habeas corpus originated in the English legal system, but it is now available in many nations...
, a fair trial
Fair Trial
Fair Trial was a British Thoroughbred racehorse and Champion sire. He was bred and raced by John Arthur Dewar who also bred and raced Tudor Minstrel....
, freedom from slavery
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
. Rights considered positive rights, as initially proposed in 1979 by the Czech jurist Karel Vasak, may include other civil and political rights such as police
Police
The police is a personification of the state designated to put in practice the enforced law, protect property and reduce civil disorder in civilian matters. Their powers include the legitimized use of force...
protection of person and property and the right to counsel
Right to counsel
Right to counsel is currently generally regarded as a constituent of the right to a fair trial, allowing for the defendant to be assisted by counsel , and if he cannot afford his own lawyer, requiring that the government should appoint one for him/her, or pay his/her legal expenses...
, as well as economic, social and cultural rights such as food
Food
Food is any substance consumed to provide nutritional support for the body. It is usually of plant or animal origin, and contains essential nutrients, such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals...
, housing
Housing
Housing may refer to:* A House* Social or public housing* Enclosure containing some equipment or mechanism*House dance...
, public education
Public education
State schools, also known in the United States and Canada as public schools,In much of the Commonwealth, including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, the terms 'public education', 'public school' and 'independent school' are used for private schools, that is, schools...
, employment
Employment
Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. An employee may be defined as:- Employee :...
, national security
National security
National security is the requirement to maintain the survival of the state through the use of economic, diplomacy, power projection and political power. The concept developed mostly in the United States of America after World War II...
, military
Military
A military is an organization authorized by its greater society to use lethal force, usually including use of weapons, in defending its country by combating actual or perceived threats. The military may have additional functions of use to its greater society, such as advancing a political agenda e.g...
, health care
Health care
Health care is the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in humans. Health care is delivered by practitioners in medicine, chiropractic, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, allied health, and other care providers...
, social security
Social security
Social security is primarily a social insurance program providing social protection or protection against socially recognized conditions, including poverty, old age, disability, unemployment and others. Social security may refer to:...
, and a minimum standard of living
Standard of living
Standard of living is generally measured by standards such as real income per person and poverty rate. Other measures such as access and quality of health care, income growth inequality and educational standards are also used. Examples are access to certain goods , or measures of health such as...
. In the "three generations"
Three generations of human rights
The division of human rights into three generations was initially proposed in 1979 by the Czech jurist Karel Vasak at the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg. He used the term at least as early as November 1977...
account of human rights, negative rights are often associated with the first generation of rights, while positive rights are associated with the second and third generations.
Some philosophers (see criticisms) disagree that the negative positive rights distinction is useful or valid.
Overview
Under the theory of positive and negative rights, a negative right is a right not to be subjected to an action of another person or group—a government, for example—usually in the form of abuse or coercionCoercion
Coercion is the practice of forcing another party to behave in an involuntary manner by use of threats or intimidation or some other form of pressure or force. In law, coercion is codified as the duress crime. Such actions are used as leverage, to force the victim to act in the desired way...
. A positive right is a right to be subjected to an action of another person or group. In theory, a negative right forbids others from acting against the right holder, while a positive right obligates others to act with respect to the right holder. In the framework of the Kantian
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
categorical imperative
Categorical imperative
The Categorical Imperative is the central philosophical concept in the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, as well as modern deontological ethics...
, negative rights can be associated with perfect duties while positive rights can be connected to imperfect duties.
Belief in a distinction between positive and negative rights is usually maintained, or emphasized, by libertarian
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
s, who believe that positive rights do not exist until they are created by contract. The United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly . The Declaration arose directly from the experience of the Second World War and represents the first global expression of rights to which all human beings are inherently entitled...
lists both positive and negative rights (but does not identify them as such). The constitutions of most liberal democracies
Liberal democracy
Liberal democracy, also known as constitutional democracy, is a common form of representative democracy. According to the principles of liberal democracy, elections should be free and fair, and the political process should be competitive...
guarantee negative rights, but not all include positive rights. Nevertheless, positive rights are often guaranteed by other laws, and the majority of liberal democracies provide their citizens with publicly funded education, health care, social security and unemployment benefit
Unemployment benefit
Unemployment benefits are payments made by the state or other authorized bodies to unemployed people. Benefits may be based on a compulsory para-governmental insurance system...
s.
When positive and negative rights conflict
Rights are often spoken of as inalienableNatural rights
Natural and legal rights are two types of rights theoretically distinct according to philosophers and political scientists. Natural rights are rights not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs of any particular culture or government, and therefore universal and inalienable...
and sometimes even absolute
Moral absolutism
Moral absolutism is an ethical view that certain actions are absolutely right or wrong, regardless of other contexts such as their consequences or the intentions behind them. Thus stealing, for instance, might be considered to be always immoral, even if done to promote some other good , and even if...
. However, in practice this is often taken as graded absolutism
Graded absolutism
Graded absolutism is a theory of moral absolutism which resolves the objection to absolutism that in moral conflicts we are obligated to opposites. Moral absolutism is the ethical view that certain actions are absolutely right or wrong regardless of other contexts such as their consequences or the...
; rights are ranked by degree of importance, and violations of lesser ones are accepted in the course of preventing violations of greater ones. Thus, even if the right not to be killed is inalienable, the corresponding obligation on others to refrain from killing is generally understood to have at least one exception: self-defense. Certain widely accepted negative obligations (such as the obligations to refrain from theft, murder, etc.) are often considered prima facie
Prima facie
Prima facie is a Latin expression meaning on its first encounter, first blush, or at first sight. The literal translation would be "at first face", from the feminine form of primus and facies , both in the ablative case. It is used in modern legal English to signify that on first examination, a...
, meaning that the legitimacy of the obligation is accepted "on its face"; but even if not questioned, such obligations may still be ranked for ethical analysis.
Thus a thief may have a negative obligation not to steal, and a police officer
Police officer
A police officer is a warranted employee of a police force...
may have a negative obligation not to tackle people—but a police officer tackling the thief easily meets the burden of proof that he acted justifiably, since his was a breach of a lesser obligation and negated the breach of a greater obligation. Likewise a shopkeeper or other passerby may also meet this burden of proof when tackling the thief. But if any of those individuals pulled a gun and shot the thief for stealing, most modern societies would not accept that the burden of proof had been met. The obligation not to kill—being universally regarded as one of the highest, if not the highest obligation—is so much greater than the obligation not to steal that a breach of the latter does not justify a breach of the former. Most modern societies insist that other, very serious ethical questions need come into play before stealing could justify killing.
Positive obligations confer duty. But as we see with the police officer, exercising a duty may violate negative obligations (e.g. not to overreact and kill). For this reason, in ethics positive obligations are almost never considered prima facie. The greatest negative obligation may have just one exception—one higher obligation of self-defense—but even the greatest positive obligations generally require more complex ethical analysis. For example, one could easily justify failing to help, not just one, but a great many injured children quite ethically in the case of triage
Triage
Triage or ) is the process of determining the priority of patients' treatments based on the severity of their condition. This rations patient treatment efficiently when resources are insufficient for all to be treated immediately. The term comes from the French verb trier, meaning to separate,...
after a disaster. This consideration has led ethicists to agree in a general way that positive obligations are usually junior to negative obligations because they are not reliably prima facie. Critics of positive rights implicitly suggest that because positive obligations are not reliably prima facie they must always be agreed to through contract.
Nineteenth century philosopher Frederic Bastiat
Frédéric Bastiat
Claude Frédéric Bastiat was a French classical liberal theorist, political economist, and member of the French assembly. He was notable for developing the important economic concept of opportunity cost.-Biography:...
summarized the conflict between these negative and positive rights by saying:
According to Jan Narveson
Jan Narveson
Jan Narveson, OC is professor of philosophy emeritus at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. An anarcho-capitalist and contractarian, Narveson's form of libertarian anarchism is deeply influenced by the thought of Robert Nozick and David Gauthier.Narveson was born in Erskine,...
, the view of some that there is no distinction between negative and positive rights on the ground that negative rights require police and courts for their enforcement is "mistaken." He says that the question between what one has a right to do and who if anybody enforces it are separate issues. If rights are only negative then it simply means no one has a duty to enforce them, although individuals have a right to use any non-forcible means to gain the cooperation of others in protecting those rights. Therefore, he says "the distinction between negative and positive is quite robust." http://www.againstpolitics.com/libertarianism/index.html Libertarians hold that positive rights, which would include a right to be protected, do not exist until they are created by contract. However, those who hold this view do not mean that police, for example, are not obligated to protect the rights of citizens. Since they contract with their employers to defend citizens from violence, then they have created that obligation to their employer. A negative right to life allows an individual to defend his life from others trying to kill him, or obtain voluntary assistance from others to defend his life—but he may not force others to defend him, because he has no natural right to be provided with defense. To force a person to defend one's own negative rights, or the negative rights of a third party, would be to violate that person's negative rights.
Other advocates of the view that there is a distinction between negative and positive rights argue that the presence of a police force or army is not due to any positive right to these services that citizens claim, but rather because they are natural monopolies or public goods—features of any human society that arise naturally, even while adhering to the concept of negative rights only. Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick was an American political philosopher, most prominent in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia , a right-libertarian answer to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice...
discusses this idea at length in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a work of political philosophy written by Robert Nozick in 1974. This minarchist book was the winner of the 1975 National Book Award...
.
In medicine
In the field of MedicineMedicine
Medicine is the science and art of healing. It encompasses a variety of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness....
, positive rights of patients often conflict with negative rights of physicians. In controversial areas such as abortion
Abortion
Abortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo prior to viability. An abortion can occur spontaneously, in which case it is usually called a miscarriage, or it can be purposely induced...
and assisted suicide
Assisted suicide
Assisted suicide is the common term for actions by which an individual helps another person voluntarily bring about his or her own death. "Assistance" may mean providing one with the means to end one's own life, but may extend to other actions. It differs to euthanasia where another person ends...
, medical professionals may not wish to offer certain services for moral or philosophical reasons. If enough practitioners opt out as a result of conscience, a right granted by conscience clause
Conscience clause
The conscience clause was an important term in education in England throughout much of 19th century. In this context, it referred to permitting parents of schoolchildren to withdraw them from Church of England worship services or other school activities that violated the parents' religious...
statutes in many jurisdictions, patients may not have any means of having their own positive rights fulfilled. Such was the case of Janet Murdock, a Montana woman who could not find any physician to assist her suicide in 2009. This controversy over positive and negative rights in medicine has become a focal part on the ongoing public debate between conservative ethicist Wesley J. Smith
Wesley J. Smith
Wesley J. Smith is a lawyer and an award-winning author, a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism. He is also a lawyer and consultant for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, and a special consultant for the Center for Bioethics and...
and radical philosopher Jacob M. Appel
Jacob M. Appel
Jacob M. Appel is an American author, bioethicist and social critic. He is best known for his short stories, his work as a playwright, and his writing in the fields of reproductive ethics, organ donation, neuroethics and euthanasia....
. In discussing the case of Baxter v. Montana
Baxter v. Montana
Baxter v. Montana, was a Montana Supreme Court case, argued on September 2, 2009, and decided on December 31, 2009, that addressed the question of whether the state's constitution guaranteed terminally ill patients a right to lethal prescription medication from their physicians.-Background of the...
, Appel has written: Smith replies that this is "taking the duty to die and transforming it into a duty to kill," which he argues "reflects a profound misunderstanding of the government’s role."
Criticisms
Presumably, if a person has positive rights it implies that other people have positive duties (to take certain actions); whereas negative rights imply that others have negative duties (to avoid certain other actions). Philosopher Henry Shue is skeptical; he believes that all rights (regardless of whether they seem more "negative" or "positive") requires both kinds of duties at once. In other words, Shue says that honouring a right will requires avoidance (a "negative" duty) but also protective or reparative actions ("positive" duties). The negative positive distinction may be a matter of emphasis; it is therefore unhelpful to describe any right as though it requires only one of the two types of duties.To Shue, rights can always be understood as confronting "standard threats" against humanity. Dealing with standard threats requires all kinds of duties, which may be divided across time (e.g. "if avoiding the harmful behaviour fails, begin to repair the damages"), but also divided across people. The point is that every right provokes all 3 types of behaviour (avoidance, protection, repair) to some degree. Dealing with a threat like murder, for instance, will require one individual to practice avoidance (e.g. the potential murderer must stay calm), others to protect (e.g. the police officer, who must stop the attack, or the bystander, who may be obligated to call the police), and others to repair (e.g. the doctor who must resuscitate a person who has been attacked). Thus, even the so-called "negative right not to be killed" can only be guaranteed with the help of some positive duties. Shue goes further, and maintains that the negative and positive rights distinction can be harmful, because it may result in the neglect of necessary duties.
James P. Sterba makes similar criticisms. He holds that any right can be made to appear either positive or negative depending on the language used to define it. He writes:
Sterba has rephrased the traditional "positive right" to provisions, and put it in the form of a sort of "negative right" not to be prevented from taking the resources on their own, albeit creating a conflict with the traditional negative right of private property. Thus, all rights may not only require both "positive" and "negative" duties, but it seems that rights that do not involve forced labor can be phrased positively or negatively at will. The distinction between positive and negative may not be very useful, or justified, as rights requiring the provision of labor can be rephrased from "right to education" or "right to health care" to "right to take surplus money to pay teachers" or "right to take surplus money to pay doctors".
See also
- EntitlementEntitlementAn entitlement is a guarantee of access to benefits based on established rights or by legislation. A "right" is itself an entitlement associated with a moral or social principle, such that an "entitlement" is a provision made in accordance with legal framework of a society...
- Second Bill of RightsSecond Bill of RightsThe Second Bill of Rights was a list of rights proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the then President of the United States, during his State of the Union Address on January 11, 1944. In his address Roosevelt suggested that the nation had come to recognize, and should now implement, a second "bill...
- Claim rights and liberty rightsClaim rights and liberty rightsSome philosophers and political scientists make a distinction between claim rights and liberty rights. A claim right is a right which entails responsibilities, duties, or obligations on other parties regarding the right-holder...
—a different distinction, orthogonal to that between positive and negative rights - ConstitutionalismConstitutionalismConstitutionalism has a variety of meanings. Most generally, it is "a complex of ideas, attitudes, and patterns of behavior elaborating the principle that the authority of government derives from and is limited by a body of fundamental law"....
- Constitutional economicsConstitutional economicsConstitutional economics is a research program in economics and constitutionalism that has been described as extending beyond the definition of 'the economic analysis of constitutional law' in explaining the choice "of alternative sets of legal-institutional-constitutional rules that constrain the...
- Rule according to higher lawRule according to higher lawThe rule according to a higher law means that no written law may be enforced by the government unless it conforms with certain unwritten, universal principles of fairness, morality, and justice...
- Freedom versus licenseFreedom versus licenseIn moral and legal philosophy, there exists a distinction between the concepts of freedom and license. The former deals with the rights of the individual; the latter covers the expressed permission for more than one individual to engage in an activity.As a result, freedoms usually include rights...
- Individual rights
- Two Concepts of LibertyTwo Concepts of LibertyTwo Concepts of Liberty was the inaugural lecture delivered by the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin before the University of Oxford on 31 October 1958. It was subsequently published as a 57-page pamphlet by Oxford at the Clarendon Press...
— a lecture by Isaiah BerlinIsaiah BerlinSir Isaiah Berlin OM, FBA was a British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas of Russian-Jewish origin, regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century and a dominant liberal scholar of his generation...
, which distinguished between positivePositive libertyPositive liberty is defined as having the power and resources to fulfill one's own potential ; as opposed to negative liberty, which is freedom from external restraint...
and negative libertyNegative libertyNegative liberty is defined as freedom from interference by other people, and is set in contrast to positive liberty, which is defined as an individual's freedom from inhibitions of the social structure within the society such as classism, sexism or racism and is primarily concerned with the... - Graded absolutismGraded absolutismGraded absolutism is a theory of moral absolutism which resolves the objection to absolutism that in moral conflicts we are obligated to opposites. Moral absolutism is the ethical view that certain actions are absolutely right or wrong regardless of other contexts such as their consequences or the...
External links
- Walter Williams, "Rights vs. Wishes", Capitalism Magazine, October 27, 2002, arguing against the validity of positive rights