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LESSON 7:
MEANING AND TYPES OF RIGHTS
Dear students, today we will learn about rights.
Points to be covered in this lesson:
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Concept of a right
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 Types of rights The concept of a “right.” obviously appears in many of themoral argu-ments and moral-claims invoked in businessdiscussions. 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 thenotion of a right.In 1948 the United Nations adopted a “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” which claimed that “all human beings” areentitled, among other things, to:
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 The right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
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 The right to work, to free choice of employment, to just andfavorable conditions of work, and to protection againstunemployment.
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 The right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for[the worker] and his family an existence worthy of humandignity . . .
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 The right to form and to join trade unions . . . the right torest 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, lieat the heart of much of our moral discourse. This section isintended 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 understandthis term in a much better way.
The Concept of a Right
 A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’sfreedom of action in a social context. - Ayn RandIndividual rights state explicitly the requirements for a person tobenefit rather than suffer from living in a society. They codify man’s protection from the initiation of force, as required by hisrational nature. Being required by man’s rational nature, rights arenot arbitrary or negotiable. They are absolute requirements for life within a society. Rights are absolute.
Right to Life
 The right to life is the fundamental right, of which all otherrights are corollaries. The right to life states that you own yourown body. It is your property to do with as you please. No onemay 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 someoneor some people essentially own you — they can dictate whatyou 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 rightsof anyone else. This is a necessity for man’s life because man’smeans of survival is reason. Survival by reason requires that youare able to act upon your reason otherwise your reason is of noavail. You can only act on your reason if you are free from thecoercion of others.If society were to permit some actions and not others, it wouldbe permitting some reason and not other reason. It would beeffectively destroying individual reason by making reason secondplace to some other standard. When a society prevents itscitizens from the initiation of force, however, it is notcircumventing reason, because there is never a reason for theinitiation of force.
Right to Property
Property rights are an extension to the right to life. In order tosupport yourself through reason and stay alive, you must beable to own and use the product of your labor. If the tools of your survival are subject to random confiscation, then your lifeis subject to random destruction.
Right to the Pursuit of Happiness
 The right to the pursuit of happiness is freedom of action. Tolive, man must achieve values. To achieve values, man must befree to think and act. The right to the pursuit of happinessmeans a man is free to do anything he pleases, as long as itdoesn’t conflict with the rights of others. Since man must usehis own mind to live, he must be able to choose his values andact 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 andhappiness.
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’sStates will outlaw certain types of speech as being dangerous orinflammatory or against the will of the people, but thiscensorship is just an evasion of reality - hoping that if a problemis ignored it will go away. Freedom of speech is required forliberty because without the freedom of speech, you cannotpersuade others of what is right and what is wrong. Without thefreedom to persuade others, only force can make people act in aparticular way. It is an important check on government because itallows transgressions to be identified and fixed rather thanhidden and perpetuated.
Right to Self Defense
 The right to defend yourself is a corollary to the right to life. Youmust be able to protect what is yours when it is threatened. If youare being attacked the situation leaves the realm of morality - itleaves the realm of the everyday and becomes an emergency. Insuch an emergency, anything goes. That is the choice that yourattacker has made, and he must live with his choice. Thegovernment 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 dosomething. A person has a right when that person is entitled toact 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 isnot an “entitlement.” A right is inalienable, whichmeans that it cannot be violated by anyone for any reason. Itshould not be violated by freelance goons, the Mafia, or even thegovernment. It cannot be, in good conscience, violated for any reason: not for “the public good,” or to feed other people. Theprice of having rights means respecting those of others. This is because, if everyone stole, raped, and murdered, then noone would be safe and no rights would exist. Adhering to therights 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 certaininterests 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 orempowered 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 theindividual to pursue certain interests or activities.
Types of Rights
Legal Rights
 The entitlement may derive from legal system that permits orempowers the person to act in a specified way or that requiresothers to act in certain ways toward that person: the entitlement isthen called legal right. Legal rights are limited to the particularjurisdiction within which legal system is in force.
Moral Rights
Entitlements can also derive from a system of moral standardsindependently of any particular legal system. Moral rights orhuman rights are based on moral norms and principles thatspecify that all human beings are permitted or empowered todo 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 toa particular jurisdiction.Moral rights are rights that impose prohibitions or require-ments on others and which thereby enable individuals to choosefreely whether to pursue certain activities or certain interests. These moral rights identify those activities or interests that theindividual is empowered to pursue, as he or she chooses; andthey protect the individual’s pursuit of those interests andactivities within the boundaries specified by the rights.
The features of Moral Rights are:
1. Moral rights and duties go hand in hand. Students youshould try to understand that if you know your rights thenyou have to know your duties also as a responsible citizen. This is because one person’s moral right generally can bedefined – at least partially in terms of the moral duties otherpeople have towards that person. To have a moral rightnecessarily implies that others have certain duties toward thebearer of that right. Duties, are generally the other side of moral rights: If I have a moral right to do something, thenother 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 notnecessarily mean that any specific employer has a duty toprovide that person with a job.2. Moral rights provide individuals with autonomy and equality in the free pursuit of their interests. A right identifies activitiesor interests that people must be left free to pursue or notpursue as they themselves choose and whose pursuit may notbe subordinated to the interests of others exceptfor special and exceptionally weighty reasons.3. Moral rights provide a basis for justifying one’s actions andfor invoking the protection or aid of others. If I have amoral right to do something, then I have a moraljustification for doing that. Moreover, if I have a right to dosomething, then others have no justification for interfering  with me.
How Moral Rights are Different from Utilitarianism:
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Moral Rights express the requirements of morality from thepoint of view of the individual while utilitarianismexpresses the requirements of morality from the point of  view of society as whole.
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Moral rights promote the individual’s welfare and protect theindividual’s choices against encroachment by society whileutilitarianism expresses the requirements of morality from thepoint 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 areallegedly 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 thatmeans you can force someone else to provide you with it2. A Negative Right is when you have a right to something, butyou have to gain/maintain it yourself.Negative rights is distinguished by the fact that its members canbe defined wholly in terms of the duties others have to notinterfere in certain activities of the person who holds a givenright. On the other hand positive rights do more than imposenegative duties. They also imply that some other agents have thepositive duty of providing the holder of the right with whateverhe or she needs to freely pursue his or her interests.
ContractualRights and Duties
Contractual rights and duties (sometimes called special rightsand 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 dosomething for you, then you are entitled to my performance: You acquire a contractual right to whatever I promised, and Ihave 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 thecorrelative duties are imposed only on other specific individual.If I agree to do something for you, everyone else does notthereby acquire new rights over me, nor do I acquire any new duties toward them.2. Contractual rights arise out of a specific transaction be-tweenparticular individuals. Unless I actually make a promise orenter some other similar arrangement with you, you do notacquire any contractual rights over me.3. Contractual rights and duties depend on a publicly acceptedsys-tem of rules that define the transactions that give rise tothose rights and duties. Contract for example, create specialrights and. duties between people only if the people recognizeand accept a system of conventions that speci-fies that by doing certain things (such as signing a paper) a person undertakes anobligation to do what he or she agrees to do Without the institution of contract and the rights and duties itcan create, modem business societies could not operate. Virtually every business transac-tion at some point requires oneto care, for the upbringing of their children; doctors have aspecial 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) thatdefines a certain position or role (such as parent, doctor, yourmanager) 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 themfrom injury, duties that the person who enters the role knows heor she is expected to fulfill. When a person freely enters the roleknowing what duties society attaches to the ac-ceptance of therole that person in effect enters an agreement to fulfill thoseduties.
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So what kind of ethical rules do you think govern contracts. The system of rules that underlies contractual rights andduties has been traditionally interpreted as including severalmoral constraints:1. Both of the parties to a contract must have full knowledgeof the nature of the agreement they are entering.2. Neither party to a contract must intentionally misrepresentthe facts of the contractual situation to other party.3. Neither party to the contract must be forced to enter thecontract 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 conditionshave traditionally been considered void.
Overview
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 A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning aman’s freedom of action in a social context. Rights areabsolute.
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 The price of having rights means respecting those of others.
Activity
Briefly discuss moral rights. How are moral rights differentfrom utilitarianism?of the parties to rely on the word of the other party to the effectthat the other party will pay later, will deliver certain serviceslater, or will transfer goods of a certain quality and quantity.Contractual rights and duties also provide a basis for the specialduties or obligations that people acquire when they accept aposition or a role within a legitimate social institution or anorganization. Married parents, for example, have a special duty 
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