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Rights based ethics (summary of main points covered in lecture)
Rights are claims against others (whether individuals or social entities) to betreated in certain
ways. Rights claims generate correlative duties on the part of others. There are two basic
divisions of rights:
l. Natural and conventional -- natural rights pertain to us by virtue of our humanity; as such they
apply to all persons. Natural rights are commonly called moral rights. Conventional rights are
created by humans, generally within the context of social and political organizations.
2. Negative and positive -- negative rights impose duties of noninterference on others. Thus my
right to life as a negative right is a right not be killed. positive rights impose duties of assistance
on others. For example, welfare rights impose on the state the duty to assist those who cannot
provide for themselves.
3. So, there are four possible categories of rights: natural negative, natural positive, conventional
negative, and conventional positive. No one doubts the existence of the latter two categories.
There is controversy about the existence of natural rights, and much greater controversy
about whether there are natural positive rights.
4. The existence of natural rights is an important matter since ifsuch rights exists they providea
basis for supporting or challenging existing the presence or absence of conventional
rights within particular societies. Rights are claims against others (whether individuals or social
entities) to be treated in certain ways. Rights claims generate correlative duties on the part of
others. There are two basic divisions of rights.
5. Moral rights are often called asserted to have priority over other sorts of moral claims. That is,
the duties they impose take preference over other duties or actions people might have except
when there are duties imposed because of someone else’s rights.
6. Remember the principle that ‘ought implies can.’ People cannot have an obligation to do
something that it is impossible for them to do. Why? an obligation on me to do X asserts that I
must choose X among the possibilities that I have. If it is not possible for me to choose X then I
cannot be obligated to choose it. So, I can have a positive right to food only if there are others for
whom it is possible to provide food. If I am in the middle of a desert, have run out of food with
other members of an expedition, and no one has any way of obtaining food, then none of us has a
right to food as a claim against the others. So too, I only have rights against individuals who can
exercise freedom and rationality. I might have a negative natural right to live with reference to
other people swimming in the ocean, but I don’t have any right to live with reference to the shark
who is chasing me.
7. The basis of natural rights. Natural rights are commonly regarded as universal rights: that is,
they are supposed to apply to all humans and, for many moral theorists, and only to humans. But
what is it about humans that provides thebasis for such rights. We looked at three such bases:
that we have them as endowed by our creator; we have them based upon actual characteristics of
humans; we have them on the basis of our potentialities and capacities.
Note the following possibilities:
