Rights: Rights are moral or legal entitlements. There are two main categories, liberties and claims.
- Liberties refer to specific freedoms the rights holder can choose to exercise or not. Freedom of movement and freedom of speech are widely accepted liberties.
- Claims refer to obligations to the rights holder by other people, organizations, or governments. For example, the requirement that most building owners must provide wheelchair ramps is a right held by wheelchair users that obligates governments and many private property owners. Note that claims can also prohibit actions. Laws against theft are an example of our right to private property.
Rights are often thought of in terms of applying to some or all individuals. They can also apply to groups of people, such as those with disabilities, or legal entities like businesses or state and local governments.
Rights are shaped by the people with the power to make constitutions and laws and by the people with the ability to compel us to obey. Two more vocabulary words apply in this light:
- Powers refer to the ability to create, change, or eliminate rights. For example, Congress has the power to create rights by passing or amending laws. Citizens also hold some powers. Negotiating contracts is an example.
- Immunities refer to situations where people cannot be compelled by a government to do (or not do) something – when the Constitution or the law denies the government the ability to compel. The phrase “shall not infringe” is a good example of the idea.
Why this matters: (1) It is challenging to make representative democracy work well without adequate individual liberties and other rights and the means to act on them.
(2) The history of political conflicts in the U.S. and around the world has often involved attempts to define and redefine rights, gain rights, or deny rights to various kinds of people. Who has what powers and who has what immunities have been big parts of some of these conflicts.
Without adequate liberties and rights, it can be challenging to make representative democracy work well. Some office-holders might be blocked from competing for re-election. Some citizens might be stopped from learning about, promoting, and voting for candidates for office – or running for office themselves.
The establishment of many of the legal rights we enjoy today follows centuries of struggle. For example, the Magna Carta established basic rights for barons and other powerful men in 13th-century England. It took several hundred years and a civil war before fundamental liberties were extended to all British citizens under their 1689 Bill of Rights. The denial of those rights to British colonists motivated the 1776 Declaration of Independence. It also informed the first set of amendments to the 1789 U.S. Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights. Another example is the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments, which served as a manifesto for women to be included in the rights established by the men who wrote those earlier documents. Since then, additional amendments and laws have followed, extending and denying rights (or claims of rights) to various groups or prohibiting discrimination based on such factors as race, sex, gender, religion, and national origin.
See also: “natural and inalienable rights,” “civil liberties,” “civil rights,” and “negative and positive rights.”
Sources:
History Channel: https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/seneca-falls-convention
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights/
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights
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