Concept
Rights
Overview
Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement; that is, rights are the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical theory. Rights are an important concept in law and ethics, especially theories of justice and deontology.
The history of social conflicts has often involved attempts to define and redefine rights. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "rights structure the form of governments, the content of laws, and the shape of morality as it is currently perceived".
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The central idea of the earlier social world is the supremacy of rights—but not of right. The sum (for it cannot be properly called a system) of rights is a self-subsistent world, to which man is but a servant; and a second peculiarity of it is its inequality. If all are equal before the laws, this only means here that the laws, with their absolute and thorough inequality, are indifferent to the real and personal…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
States what Rights is; names Rights twice.
In this way rights arise: recognised and guaranteed degrees of power. When the relations of powers to one another are materially changed, rights disappear and new ones are formed, as is demonstrated by the constant flux and reflux of the rights of nations.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day
Names Rights several times; states what Rights is.
The rights of men in governments are their advantages, and these are often in balances between differences of good; in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral denominations. By these theorists the right of the people is…
Edmund Burke, Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke
The chapter “NATURAL AND CIVIL RIGHTS.” is titled for Rights; names Rights several times.
Philosophers who discussed Rights
Related ideas
- Egalitarianism
- Austrian school of economics
- Political freedom
- French Revolution
- Free market
- Philosophy
- Human rights
- Hierarchy
- Women's rights
- Justice
- Individual and group rights
- Positive law
- Metaethics
- Law
- Monarch
- American Revolution
- Social conflict
- Babylon
- Authoritarianism
- Thomas Aquinas
- Nation
- Nature
- Natural law
- Normative ethics
Place in the tradition
Part of Japanese philosophy.