Positive Right

Negative and positive rights are rights that oblige either inaction (''negative rights'') or action (''positive rights''). These obligations may be of either a legal or moral character. The notion of positive and negative rights may also be applied to liberty rights.

To take an example involving two parties in a court of law: Adrian has a ''negative right to x'' against Clay, if and only if Clay is ''prohibited'' to act upon Adrian in some way regarding ''x''. In contrast, Adrian has a ''positive right to x'' against Clay, if and only if Clay is obliged to act upon Adrian in some way regarding ''x''. A case in point, if Adrian has a ''negative right to life'' against Clay, then Clay is required to refrain from killing Adrian; while if Adrian has a ''positive right to life'' against Clay, then Clay is required to act as necessary to preserve the life of Adrian.

''Negative rights'' may include civil and political rights such as freedom of speech, life, private property, freedom from violent crime, protection against being defrauded, freedom of religion, ''habeas corpus'', a fair trial, and the right not to be enslaved by another.

''Positive rights'', as initially proposed in 1979 by the Czech jurist Karel Vašák, may include other civil and political rights such as the right to counsel and police protection of person and property. Additionally, they may include economic, social and cultural rights such as food, housing, public education, employment, national security, military, health care, social security, internet access, and a minimum standard of living. In the "three generations" account of human rights, negative rights are often associated with the first generation of rights, while positive rights are associated with the second and third generations.

Some philosophers (see criticisms) disagree that the negative–positive rights distinction is useful or valid.

Under the theory of positive and negative rights, a negative right is a right ''not to be'' subjected to an action of another person or group such as a government, usually occurring in the form of abuse or coercion. Negative rights exist unless someone acts to ''negate'' them. A positive right is a right ''to be'' subjected to an action of another person or group. In the framework of the Kantian categorical imperative, negative rights can be associated with perfect duties, while positive rights can be connected to imperfect duties.

The belief in a distinction between positive and negative rights is generally maintained, or emphasized, by libertarians, who believe that positive rights do not exist until they are created by a contract. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights lists both positive and negative rights (but does not identify them as such). The constitutions of most liberal democracies guarantee negative rights, but not all include positive rights. Positive rights are often guaranteed by other laws, and the majority of liberal democracies provide their citizens with publicly funded education, health care, social security and unemployment benefits.

When negative and positive rights conflict

Rights are deemed to be inalienable. However, in practice this is often taken as graded absolutism, as rights are ranked by their degree of importance, and violations of less important rights are accepted in the course of preventing violations of more important ones. Even if the right to not be killed is inalienable, the corresponding obligation on others to refrain from killing generally has at least one exception: self-defense. Certain widely accepted negative obligations (such as the obligations to refrain from theft, murder, etc.) are often considered prima facie, meaning that the legitimacy of the obligation is accepted "on its face"; but even if not questioned, such obligations may still be ranked for ethical analysis. Most modern societies insist that other ethical questions need to come into play before stealing can justify killing. Due to being universally regarded as one of the highest obligations, the obligation not to kill is significantly greater than the obligation not to steal. This is why a breach of the latter does not justify a breach of the former act.

Positive obligations confer duty. In ethics, positive obligations are almost never considered '' prima facie''. The greatest negative obligation may have just one exception—one higher obligation of self-defense. However, even the greatest positive obligations generally require more complex ethical analysis. For example, one could easily justify failing to help, not just one, but several injured children quite ethically, in the case of triage after a disaster. This consideration has led ethicists to agree in a general way that positive obligations are usually junior to negative obligations, as they are not reliably ''prima facie''. Some critics of positive rights implicitly suggest that because positive obligations are not reliably ''prima facie,'' they must always be agreed to through contract.

Nineteenth-century philosopher Frédéric Bastiat summarized the conflict between these negative and positive rights by saying:

Jan Narveson argues that the claim suggesting there is no distinction between negative and positive rights because negative rights require police and courts for enforcement is "mistaken." He says that the question between what one has a right to do and if anybody enforces it, are separate issues. If rights are only negative, then it means that no one has a duty to enforce them, however, individuals have a right to use any non-forcible means to gain the cooperation of others in protecting those rights. He says "the distinction between negative and positive is quite robust." Libertarians hold that positive rights, which would include a right to be protected, do not exist until they are created by a contract. However, those with this view do not mean that police, for example, are not obligated to protect the rights of citizens. Since they contract with their employers to defend citizens from violence, then they have created that obligation to their employer. A negative right to life may allow an individual to defend his life from others trying to kill him, or obtain voluntary assistance from others to defend his life.

Other advocates of the view that there is a distinction between negative and positive rights argue that the presence of a police force or army is not due to any positive right to these services that citizens claim, but rather because they are natural monopolies or public goods. These are features of any human society that arise naturally, even while adhering to the concept of negative rights only. Robert Nozick

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