Appeals to rights are common and influential both in everyday life and in public affairs. Legal as well as moral rights are important in guiding conduct, but the latter are my main concern. The notion of a moral right presents a challenge. On the one hand, it does not seem morally basic, and no major kind of ethical theory – even the major deontological ones, Kantian and intuitionist – takes it as such. On the other hand, it is not readily accounted for in terms of the concepts provided by the major ethical theories – or by any others. This would be less disturbing if it were clear just what our moral rights are. In the widest usage, illustrated by the breadth of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, rights include what some would regard as simply morally reasonable aspirations.

This paper will not provide a full-scale account of rights. My aim is chiefly to examine a question important for understanding morality in general as well as rights in particular: the relation between violations of moral rights and other moral wrongs. It is clear that whatever the moral rights we have, violation of them is a moral wrong. This is central for rights discourse. But may we also say that an act which does not violate rights is not wrong? It may be natural to think so. It is especially common to presuppose something similar: that if you have a right to A, then in A-ing, you do not act wrongly. I will question this. Our rights imply much about what should not be done, but they tell us far less about what should be done. First, however, we must consider what, in general, constitutes a right.

I Sketch of a conception of moral rights

On any conception of rights, they are the sorts of things of which we may predicate (among other things) being claimed, asserted, denied, respected, violated, forfeited, and transferred. Perhaps some rights, such as the right not to be enslaved, are “inalienable” and hence cannot be transferred; some may also be plausibly held to be incapable of forfeit.