Rights as reasons for action or forbearance

A person's duties are reasons for him to act or to forbear, whether he wants to or not. A person's rights, on the other hand, are reasons for someone else to act or forbear. So too, however, are a person's needs, his pain, his deserts, and possibly his merits. These too can give rise to duties which rest on other persons, but do not necessarily establish rights against those persons. What then distinguishes rights from other reasons for action and, in particular, from reasons constituted by the welfare needs, not of human beings alone but of other valuable objects (axiotima) as well – hens, works of art, or rain forests?

To say of someone that he has a right to Φ is paradigmatically to say that by virtue of a set of normative relations that hold between him and some particular respondent or people at large, there are certain demands such that his making them would be a reason for the respondent's acceding to them and would put the latter in the wrong if, without some overriding reason, he did not accede to them. H.L.A. Hart, in an influential article, points to the power of waiver as a distinguishing characteristic of a right. “If common usage sanctions talk of the rights of animals or babies,” Hart wrote, “it makes an idle use of the expression ‘a right,’ which will confuse the situation with other different moral situations where the expression ‘a right’ has specific force.”