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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 April 2017
The concept of rights, as has often been noted, became prominent at a particular time in our history. It is associated especially with seventeenth and eighteenth century political ideas about the rights of individuals versus those of governments, and with such notable events as the American Declaration of Independence. It was at this time, too, that debates about rights of property and liberty became prominent. What was the role of this concept in earlier times? Has it always existed? Does it have a permanent place in our moral thinking? According to H.L.A. Hart,
the concept of a right, legal or moral, is not to be found in the work of the Greek philosophers, and certainly there is no noun or noun phrase in Plato or Aristotle which is the equivalent of our expression ‘a right’, as distinct from ‘right action’ or ‘the right thing to do’.
1 Essays on Bentham (OUP 1982), 163.Google Scholar
2 After Virtue, (Notre Dame 1981), 67.Google Scholar
3 Miller, Fred D. Jr., Nature, Justice and Rights in Aristotle's Politics (Oxford 1995), ch. 4.Google Scholar
4 Melden, A.I., Rights and Persons (Blackwell 1977), 40 (italics added).Google Scholar
5 The importance, to the concept of rights, of grounds for resentment, was noted by S.I. Benn. See his ‘Human rights—for whom and for what?’ in Kamenka, E. (ed.), Human Rights (Arnold 1978)Google Scholar; also his Theory of Freedom (CUP 1988), ch. 13.Google Scholar
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8 According to Dworkin, ‘the prospect of utilitarian gains cannot justify preventing a man from doing what he wants to do’ (op. cit., 193)—in this case, exercising his right of free speech. But it is not clear why he thinks this. (In another passage he concedes that the prevention could be justified in order to ‘obtain a clear and public benefit’, but not on ‘minimal grounds’ (193–4).)
9 In my use of ‘resentment’ in the following discussion I have been influenced by Strawson, P.F.'s well-known ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, Methuen 1974).Google Scholar
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13 My classification of rights is not meant to be comprehensive and neither is it in competition with the comprehensive and much-debated classification of rights by Hohfeld, W.N. in his Fundamental Legal Conceptions (London, 1919)Google Scholar. Hohfeld's system was inspired largely by juristic considerations, and I have not found it useful for my purpose. My main purpose is to show (a) how kinds of rights, and the concept of rights in general, originate, and (b) to compare rights with other kinds of moral reasons.
14 The importance of ‘Established Practices’ is discussed by Scanlon, T.M. in ‘Promises and Practices’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 19, 1990, 199–226.Google Scholar
15 Cf. Minogue, K.R., ‘Natural Rights’, in Kamenka, E. (ed.), Human Rights (Arnold 1978), 19Google Scholar. The expression ‘no-right’ also occurs in Hohfeld's classification, loc. cit., but not with the same meaning.
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17 For a different way of defending the distinction, see O'Neill, Onora, Towards Justice and Virtue (CUP 1996), 131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
18 Here I disagree with O'Neill's remarks about rights and obligations. According to her, ‘any right must be matched by some corresponding obligation … Unless obligation-bearers can be identified by right-holders, claims to have rights amount only to rhetoric … This condition can be met for universal rights when they are matched by corresponding universal obligations that are allocated to all others … Liberty rights provide a paradigm of universal rights.’ (op.cit, 129).
19 ‘What corresponds to ‘I have a right to do X’ is not ‘You have duty to let me do X’ but ‘You have no right to stop me from doing X’, where the emphasis in the sentence may fall on on the ‘you’ or on the ‘right’ according to the point that is being made …’ (Minogue, , op. cit., 19).Google Scholar
20 Treatise (ed. Selby-Bigge), ‘Of the origin of justice and property’, 490.Google Scholar
21 Hume also says that the ‘convention or agreement betwixt us’ would come about ‘… without the interposition of a promise’. But such an agreement would have to be understood as a promise. If each of us merely expressed an interest in not having his possessions disturbed by the other, this would not yet amount to an agreement.
22 A similar objection is made by Melden, (op. cit. 94–5)Google Scholar to Rawls's account of promising.
23 In a further passage Hume compared the human situation with regard to property to that of ‘two men who pull the oars of a boat’ (490). They do it, he says, ‘by an agreement or convention, though they have never given promises to each other’. Presumably Hume was thinking of a situation in which progress would be impeded or impossible if the men did not pull together. But in that case, the ‘agreement or convention’ would amount to no more than a natural reaction to those physical conditions, without any need for a convention or artifice.
24 The former should not be confused with Berlin's ‘positive freedom’ (Berlin, Isaiah, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969)).Google Scholar
25 Wellman, Carl, An Approach to Rights (Kluwer, 1997), 115–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
26 Cf. Scanlon, T.M., What We Owe to Each Other (Harvard, 1998), 253Google Scholar: ‘I want to choose the furniture for my own living room, pick out the pictures for the walls and write my own lectures despite the fact that these things might be done better by someone else. For better or worse, I want them to result from and hence to reflect my own taste, imagination, and powers of discrimination and analysis.’
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28 Cf. Benn, , A Theory of Freedom (CUP, 1988), 270ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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31 Sometimes an ambiguous wording can help. I once heard a play in which an aspiring poet asks a repected aunt for her opinion of his latest product. Her cautious answer was: ‘You should work harder at your poetry’. Was her point that his work was deficient, or that it was worthy of more work?
32 Article 19 of the UN ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ of 1948.
33 Cf. O'Neill, Onora, Towards Justice and Virtue (CUP, 1996), ch. 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
34 Cf. Melden, op. cit. ‘The fact that a stranger needs my help does not in itself establish that he has a right to it; and granted that I ought to give him help it is not always or even generally true that I ought to do so because I am under an obligation to him. The fact that my help will benefit him is reason enough (17).
35 Bentham, in his famous remark about ‘nonsense upon stilts’, took ‘imprescriptible’ in the negative sense: that such rights cannot be revoked; but the word also has, or had, the positive sense of ‘being able to be prescribed’.
36 ‘On Liberty’ in Utilitarianism (ed. Warnock, M., Collins 1962), 187.Google Scholar
37 The Age of Reason, (Penguin), 118.Google Scholar
38 Callicles, in Plato's Gorgias, tells us that a man ‘should encourage his appetites to be as strong as possible’ and then ‘be able by means of his courage and intelligence to satisfy them in all their intensity by providing them with whatever they happen to desire.’ Socrates succeeds in making fun of Callicles's position, but the opposite extreme is also not endorsed in the dialogue. Given the question ‘Then the view that those who have no wants are happy is wrong?’, Callicles is allowed to reply: ‘Of course; at that rate stones and corpses would be supremely happy’ (492a–e)
39 Politics 1252a34. See also Levin, Michael, ‘Natural Subordination’, Philosophy 1997Google Scholar; and Brook, D.H.M., ‘Dogs and Slaves’, PAS 1987–1988.Google Scholar
40 Some Boy Scouts were asked by the Scoutmaster to report on their good deed for the day’. One boy said he had helped an old lady to cross the road, and was commended for doing so. A second boy reported that he had also helped the old lady to cross the road, for which he was also commended. But when the third and fourth boys reported likewise, the Scoutmaster was moved to ask whether it really took so many to help an old lady to cross the road. ‘The trouble was’, replied one of the boys, ‘she didn't want to cross the road.’
41 I am grateful for comments on previous drafts from Peter Cave, David Cockburn, Laurence Goldstein, Peter Hacker, John Kekes, and John Tasioulas.