Rights

In jurisprudence and law, a right is the legal or moral entitlement to do or refrain from doing something or to obtain or refrain from obtaining an action, thing or recognition in civil society. Compare with privilege, or a thing to which one has a just claim. Rights serve as rules of interaction between people, and, as such, they place constraints and obligations upon the actions of individuals or groups (for example, if one has a right to life, this means that others do not have the liberty to murder him).

Most modern conceptions of rights are universalist and egalitarian - in other words, equal rights are granted to all people. There are two main modern conceptions of rights: on the one hand, the idea of natural rights holds that there is a certain list of rights enshrined in nature that cannot be legitimately modified by any human power. On the other hand, the idea of legal rights holds that rights are human constructs, created by society, enforced by governments and subject to change.

By contrast, most pre-modern conceptions of rights were hierarchical, with different people being granted different rights, and some having more rights than others. For instance, the rights of a father to be respected by his son did not indicate a duty upon the father to return that respect, and the divine right of kings to hold absolute power over their subjects did not leave room for many rights to be granted to the subjects themselves. The concept of natural right developed in the School of Salamanca in the late 16th century, and first gained widespread acceptance nearly 200 years later, during the Age of Enlightenment.

It is not generally considered necessary that a right should be understood by the holder of that right; thus rights may be recognized on behalf of another, such as children's rights or the rights of people declared mentally incompetent to understand their rights. However, rights must be understood by someone in order to have legal existence, so the understanding of rights is a social prerequisite for the existence of rights. Therefore, educational opportunities within society have a close bearing upon the people's ability to erect adequate rights structures.

There are two fundamental controversies surrounding the notion of rights: First, there is the question of the basis for rights (on what basis rights can be said to exist). Second, there is the question of the content of rights (what the rights of a person actually are).