The wikipedia article on rights is badly in need of a rewriting to present a clear overview and index to the subject.
For a start, it does not address the fundamental difference between moral and legal rights. Moral rights are claims, can multiply like angels on a pinhead, and can conflict willy-nilly. Legal rights are claims that are enforced, and where they conflict they need to be resolved lest enforcement conflicts (battles) ensue.
In addition, it's entirely missing the Hohfeld taxonomy of rights, which emphasizes that every right creates an obligation (duty) for others.
But the annoying thing is this grotesque paragraph viewing rights through the ideological lens of positive and negative rights:
The conception of a right to something that implicitly creates an obligation on someone else to provide that thing (a positive right) is widely challenged. You can not enforce your wish for something (under the auspices of a right) if it implicitly constitutes an obligation on another to do something for you. However, one person's right to something creates a negative right in that you have the right for that thing not be interfered with by another, and that other is obligated not to interfere with your right to it. The obligation test is widely used to determine what constitutes a right. To illustrate: You have the right to own an axe, but you do not have a right to an axe. If you do own an axe, others have an obligation not to steal it.
This isn't a description of rights: it is an application of a libertarian theory of ethics to rights. In first world societies, positive legal rights abound, ranging from rights to jury trial to social welfare rights.
Revising the whole rights page would be a great deal of work: perhaps we should start small and address this one paragraph.
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3 comments:
Funny thing: I just looked at the Talk:Right page, and there were pretty much the same criticisms.
The first paragraph has bias:
if one is granted by society a right to a free public education, this would impose on someone else participating in that society an obligation to pay taxes in order to pay the costs of that education
Debatably true, but why mention it in the first paragraph apropos of nothing? It's a thinly disguised attempt to trojan a libertarian point about negative rights into the article intro under the guise of neutrality.
John, we all understand the Libertarian perspective even if we disagree with it, but what have you comments got to do with the neutrality of the Wikipedia article?
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