World-Wide Ethics Chapter Seven Rights The preceding chapters covered several theories explaining the principles we rely on for our knowledge of right and wrong. Some of these theories have been popular for ages, even though they are not very plausible. For example, although many people still believe that matters of right and wrong are left to each individual s opinions ( individual subjectivism ), this theory does not hold up to criticism. The present chapter shifts the focus from the moral principles of right and wrong to a slightly different concept in ethics: to the concept of rights. A new dimension of ethics will begin to emerge with this concept: the relation between ethics and politics, or between ethics and laws and governments. It can be said with nearly absolute certainty that all the readers of this chapter are already convinced that they have rights, and that, for the most part, their rights are equal to everyone else s. It is equally certain that no readers think their rights are based merely on their own opinions. Still, even with all this certainty about rights, few people can explain what their rights are. From Right to Rights To introduce the concept of rights, it will help to show how it developed from an earlier, more primitive concept: the concept of right action. Imagine what the world would be like if people always observed correct moral principles in their conduct, and acted rightly. If that were the way everyone always behaved, then nothing would be acquired through wrongdoing, and everything people possess would be something they are right to possess. Our actual world is not like that, of course. Yet our practices and behavior observe moral principles closely enough that it makes sense to talk about right possession. The idea of what individuals would be able to do in a world where everyone acts rightly, and what they would have, is the origin of the concept of rights. What Rights Are Rights are relations. A relation is a way two or more things can be related to one another. Marriage is an example of a relation two people can be married to each other. Employment is another relation one person can be an employer, having another person as an employee. Heavier than is also a relation one thing can be heavier than another. A right is a relation between at least two things, or terms : (i) the person who has the right; and (ii) the thing the right is a right to. The one who has the right is called the subject of the right. The thing the right is to is called the right s object. There cannot be any rights without subjects, nor can there be any rights that have no objects. That is, there is no right that is not someone s right, and there is no right that is not a right to something. A third term involved in every right is (iii) someone else s duty. When there is a right, there is always someone, perhaps many, with a duty regarding the right s object. This duty can also be called an obligation, and it makes actions affecting the right s object either right or wrong. For example, if Shandra has an ownership-right to a car, then others have an obligation not to drive it without her permission. If someone does, it is wrong, or a violation of her right. 1
A fourth element of the right-relation is essential. Subjects of rights always also have (iv) permission to enforce others compliance with their duties regarding the object, or permission to seek a remedy for their rights violations. For this reason, having a right permits us to do things we would not otherwise be permitted to do. The four elements of a right, clockwise: the relation between (i) subject and (ii) object; (iii) the duty regarding the object; and (iv) the subject s permission. To understand the fourth element of rights, and why it is essential, consider an extreme example. Your having a right to life means that you are the subject of this right, that your life is its object, and that others have the duty not to take your life. If someone were attempting to take your life, then you would have permission to kill him in order to prevent his doing so. The fourth element of your right is this permission. You would not have it if you did not have a right to life; and you would not have a right to life if you did not have this permission. From ancient times people have known that killing is wrong. But some people have taken this to mean that all killing is wrong, even killing in self-defense. If that is correct, then there is no right to life. Your having a right to life means not only that others are wrong to kill you, but also that you have permission to do what is necessary to prevent your being killed. If you do not have that permission, then there is no reason to say you have a right to life. All that can be said is that others have the duty not to kill you. A less extreme example will reveal another aspect of the fourth element of rights. A right permits the subject to enforce it, or to enforce others compliance with their duty regarding its object. But the right does not obligate, or require the subject to enforce it. The permission means only that the subject is free to choose to enforce the right, or not. Suppose you have an old bicycle that you do not care about. You never ride it, although you keep it locked. If one day you find that your bike has been stolen, you might think nothing of it. A few days later you might see someone riding your bike, but think, So what? Your right to the bicycle gives you permission to confront the thief and take it back, or to call the police and have them recover it for you. But your right does not require you to do this. You can simply forget about it. This is called waiving your right. By waiving your right in a case like this you would make the thief the new owner of the bicycle. You Have the Right to Remain Silent Among the rights most familiar to Americans are a few named for the man who made them famous. They are called Miranda rights, after Ernesto Miranda (1940-76). Ernesto had an unfortunate and troubled childhood in Mesa, Arizona. He never finished school, and he spent most of his adult life behind bars. Yet he turned out to be the focus of a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1963, Ernesto confessed to a kidnapping and rape, after police convinced him that the victim had identified him in a line-up. That was not exactly true. But no attorney was present while the police prompted Ernesto to confess; and they had not informed him that having an attorney present was an option. He was subsequently convicted of the crime, based on his confession, and he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. But his courtappointed defense attorney doubted that his confession was admissible as evidence. In the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution, the Fifth 2
Amendment guarantees a right against selfincrimination. According to that part of the Constitution, citizens cannot be compelled to testify against themselves. Yet that is what happened to Ernesto Miranda, his attorney believed. He was tricked into confessing, and his confession was used against him, as his testimony. The attorney proceeded to file appeal after appeal until, in 1966, Miranda s case reached the Supreme Court. The judges there ruled in Miranda s favor, by a narrow margin, and they overturned his conviction. The ruling majority on the court said that since Mr. Miranda had not been informed that he had a right against self-incrimination, and a right to have an attorney present to give him legal advice during questioning, his confession could not be used in court. Ernesto Miranda learned of his Supreme Court victory in prison, while watching television. But the state of Arizona soon tried and convicted him again, based on other evidence. He therefore spent the next nine years in prison. Not long after his release, in 1976, he was stabbed to death in a bar fight (see Lief and Caldwell, 56). The Supreme Court decision known as Miranda vs. Arizona, directed that before every arrest, except in some exceptional circumstances, police have a duty to inform arrestees of their rights. The arresting officer must say: You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to the presence of an attorney to assist you prior to questioning and to be with you during questioning if you so desire. If you cannot afford an attorney, you have the right to have an attorney appointed for you prior to questioning. These statements became known as the Miranda warning and the rights mentioned in the warning soon came to be called the Miranda rights. Also, a new verb entered the American vocabulary as a result of Ernesto s victory: to Mirandize, meaning to read someone the Miranda warning. According to the Supreme Court decision of 1966, the right not to be compelled to testify against oneself, as expressed in the Fifth Amendment, means that law enforcement officers have the duty not to force suspects to confess, nor trick them into confessing. One way they can violate that duty, as in the Miranda case, is by neglecting to notify suspects of their rights to remain silent, and to have an attorney present for questioning. But the Miranda rights mean more than that the police are wrong to neglect to provide the warning. They mean also and this is the fourth element of rights that unwarned suspects charged with crimes have permission to plead for the court s throwing out their statements to police, or permission to appeal to have their convictions based on those statements overturned. Dieu et Mon Droit Today s concept of a right seems not to have emerged in human thought and language until early in the second millennium (after the year 1000). Ancient people had only a rudimentary understanding of what rights are, even if they understood right and wrong, and moral principles and judgments. They expressed ideas like possessing or using something by right, meaning that someone rightly possesses or uses something; but they did not acknowledge the full range of rights we recognize today, including what are called human rights. In ancient times, it was commonly believed that kings and queens were favored by gods, and that they received their authority from gods. In the late 12 th century the English king, Richard I ( Richard the Lion Hearted ), thought of his kingship as a right. He attributed an important victory in battle to God and my right, by which he meant that God had been on his side, and preserved his kingship. In French, God and my right is 3
Dieu et mon droit. (French was the of the official language of early English kings.) So Richard took this phrase as his motto, and today it remains the motto of the English crown. Dieu et Mon Droit as incorporated into the royal coat of arms appearing today on passports for the United Kingdom. The right that Richard claimed would later become known as the divine right of kings. Modern thinking about human rights was shaped in part by the concept of this divine right, as will be shown just below. A right like this would today be called a privilege. King Richard saw himself as enjoying the privilege of ruling the English people, by God s favor. It is not clear whether he considered the privilege to be revocable. But theoretically, God could revoke the divine right if he were somehow displeased with a king s conduct. The Miranda rights are privilege-rights also. Declining to cooperate during police questioning is a privilege; so is having a lawyer present, whether you can afford one or not. But these rights can be revoked in exceptional cases: in the questioning of suspected terrorists, for example. Rights to Things The object of King Richard s divine right was ruling his kingdom. But a large class of rights are to things like houses and cars, and to books and even to clothes. The objects of these rights are, in general, people s belongings: the things they own. The word property applies to such things, and people s rights to them are called property-rights, or sometimes, rights of ownership. Some differences between Richard s privilege-right and common property-rights are worth noting. First, Richard s privilege to rule the people of England was not the same as his owning the people of England. They did not belong to him. Second, his privilege-right could be revoked. But a property right is not revocable. Something can be taken away from its rightful owner, though this is not the same as taking away the owner s right. For example, if someone steals Shandra s car, she is still its rightful owner; her right to her car has not been revoked. Property and Poverty A few centuries after King Richard claimed that God had given him a privilege-right to rule, a controversy related to rights of ownership arose in the Catholic church. It turned out to be significant for understanding what would later become known as human rights. A sect of Franciscan friars took their vow of poverty very seriously. They believed that just as Jesus and his disciples lived without owning anything, they too would renounce all ownership-rights. They claimed not to own anything at all. They said that everything they possessed, their clothes, their beds, even their food, all belonged to the church. They said they were only using those things. The Pope at the time, John XXII, disagreed. He argued that if Jesus and the disciples had no rights to the things they used, then they were wrong to use them. But Jesus would not have done anything wrong. So he must have had rights to things he used. Further, Pope John thought it ridiculous that the Catholic church should own every trivial thing used by the Franciscan brothers. For what sane man could believe, he wrote, that to the Roman church would be preserved the dominion over one egg, one bean, or one crust of bread, which are often given to the brothers (quoted in Lambert, 233). The 4
members of the Franciscan brotherhood were not persuaded by Pope John, and they continued to defy him over their disavowal of property-rights. The controversy raged for over a decade. The Pope won, eventually, which meant that in the Roman Catholic church it became impossible for human beings to renounce all property, or to live without property-rights. This seems to have been the beginning of the modern recognition that human beings have at least some rights that it is impossible for them to renounce, even as a matter of conscience. Nowadays we refer to these as inalienable rights, meaning that it is impossible to take these right away from human beings, and even impossible for human beings to give them away, or to renounce them. The American Declaration In the following centuries, scholars in ethics and law continued to debate about rights, and to refine their understanding of them. By the time of the American Revolution, the assumption that ordinary human beings possess a set of fundamental rights was commonplace. Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, [and] that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. This document was addressed to King George III, of England, who also ruled the American colonies. It was an explanation why the colonists believed they were right to declare their independence from English rule, and set up their own government. Jefferson s line, that all men are created equal was directed to King George. He was the latest in a long line of English kings, stretching back to Richard I, who believed they had been created unequally. They believed that God had created them with the unique right to rule other human beings. Jefferson was therefore saying to the King, You only happen to have the right to govern the British Empire, but you were created just like the rest of us. All human beings are born with the same God-given rights. Naturally, George took offense. Jefferson wrote, famously, that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. He went on to say, That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. He meant, in other words, that English kings do not acquire their privilege-right to govern the people from God (remember Richard I, Dieu et mon Droit ). That privilege comes instead from the consent of the people themselves and the people can always revoke the privilege. In writing that men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, it is doubtful that Jefferson meant this literally. He had taken Introduction to Ethics as a college student in Williamsburg, Virginia, and he was aware of what philosophers have long explained about the relation between morality and religion (divine command theory). If our rights come to us from God, then there is no reason why God would have had to give us any rights at all. Not only could he have chosen not to give us rights to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness, he could have given us instead a set of virtually useless rights: like the right to sleep in on weekdays beginning with T, or the right to fly. Jefferson most likely believed that, since our species is part of nature, and we have a human nature, our fundamental rights belong to us by nature. We are born with them. Pope John XXII might have said something similar. He might have said that considering the way it is natural for human beings to live, they cannot avoid having ownership-rights. He might have said that it is the nature of human beings to own things not merely to 5
use them, but to have ownership-rights to them. Human Rights Documents The American Declaration of Independence is a kind of milestone in the history of ethics. So also are the US Constitution s Bill of Rights and, from the same time period, the French Republic s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. These documents express what are thought to be the basic rights of all human beings. They list various objects of human rights, and indicate that governments have duties regarding these objects. Jefferson listed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as some of the objects of human rights. The Bill of Rights lists several more particular objects of rights, including freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the right of assembly. The French Declaration lists, among others: liberty, property, safety and resistance against oppression. In more recent times (1948), the United Nations issued a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document incorporates ideas about rights from those previously mentioned, and is meant to serve as a model for laws and policies of all the world s governments. The United Nations actively encourages countries of the world to respect the human rights of their citizens. Yet the UN is unable to force any governments to do so. The Universal Declaration lists over twice the number of human rights mentioned in earlier documents; and some of these are controversial. For example, Article 16 says that Marriage shall be entered into only with the full consent of the intending spouses. While this is commonly observed in Western cultures, parents in other traditions believe they are right to arrange their children s marriages without their full consent. Moral and Legal Rights Human rights would be moral rights. They belong to human beings regardless of what the legal systems of their countries are like. Human rights would be the same for all human beings, while legal rights would be rights acknowledged in actual legal systems, which can be different in different countries. Still, different legal systems should recognize the moral rights of human beings, and enforce laws based on their human rights. That is what the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights sets as a goal for all the world s governments. In the Declaration of Independence, after listing the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Jefferson said something about governments. To secure these rights, he wrote, governments are instituted among men. By those words he meant that the purpose of governments is to secure or protect the moral rights of human beings. If Jefferson was correct about this, then governments are not fulfilling the purpose for which they exist unless they enforce laws respecting human rights: unless they create legal rights based on human beings moral rights. We have seen the four elements of a right: the subject; the object; others duties; and the subject s permissions. To create a legal right, a government would pass a law creating a legal duty regarding an object, and provide for a subject s permission to enforce that duty, or to seek a remedy. For example, the United States government recently created a legal duty regarding same-sex marriage, and in so doing created a legal right. When a same-sex couple applies for a marriage license today, and meets the criteria for marriage, a county clerk has the legal duty to authorize their license, so they can be married. If the clerk refuses to fulfill this duty, as has sometimes happened, the couple has legal permission go to court to seek a remedy. The court must accept their 6
plea, and compel the clerk to do his or her duty by imposing a fine, or jail time, or both. Because of this complex legal structure, same-sex couples have a legal right to marry in the US. They are (i) subjects of a right, the (ii) object of which is a marriage license. Others have (iii) a legal duty to provide them with that object; and if the duty is not fulfilled, the subjects have (iv) permission to seek a remedy in a court of law. Jefferson wrote that the purpose of governments is to secure the moral rights of human beings. By passing laws and enforcing them, governments provide orderly, civilized ways for subjects of rights to exercise their permission of enforcement. Without such legal remedies, people with little power may have no opportunity to secure the objects of their human rights. Utilitarianism and Rights Not everyone thinks there are human rights. Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, was one of these people. He read the American Declaration of Independence when it first arrived in England, and as a good Englishman he completely disagreed with it. When the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen arrived in England a few years later, he wrote a response in which he flat-out rejected the human rights enumerated there. He called these so-called rights, nonsense nonsense upon stilts. It is relatively easy to see why Bentham would be antagonistic to rights. As a utilitarian, he believed that a government s actions and policies are right only when they produce the greatest overall happiness. As he saw it, so-called human rights, or moral rights, can get in the way of overall happiness; and that s a problem. He believed that it is better that most people are as happy as can be, than that all people s equal rights are respected. For example, if it turns out that a society is overall happier when it adheres to only one religion, as in Saudi Arabia, then the government would be wrong to grant its citizens freedom of religion. A society might be happier if its citizens have the freedom to worship in whichever way they please; and Bentham would probably have agreed that this is true. His point, though, would be that governments should not be expected to secure so-called human rights at the expense of overall happiness, as the Declaration of Independence seems to say. Instead, according to Bentham s way of thinking, governments should be expected to enforce whatever laws result in the greatest happiness for the greatest number; and for this reason, it is nonsense to assume there are some pre-established, moral rights that governments are expected to secure, as Jefferson claimed. Animal Rights In all of the examples of rights discussed so far, their subjects have been human beings. Is there any reason to think that only human beings have rights? One reason is based on the fourth element of rights. This element grants subjects of rights permissions to act in ways that would otherwise be wrong for them to act. To recall an example used above, taking a bicycle away from someone would ordinarily be wrong. But if you have a right to the bicycle, because you are its rightful owner, then you are permitted to take it away from the one who now has it. Since only human beings can act in ways that would be wrong if they did not have permission to do so, it seems that only humans can have rights. Recall also that another aspect of the fourth element is the ability to waive a right. If you do not care that your bicycle was stolen, and you would rather not bother to take it back, you can choose to waive your right of ownership. But 7
this is something that only human beings would be capable of doing. It is hard to imagine any animals having the cognitive ability to waive a right. They do not have the capacity to think in these terms. On the other hand, some human beings are incapable of waiving their rights; and yet, we would probably not deny that they have rights. Toddlers are a good example; as are some people with mental disabilities. Even though utilitarian thinkers of the past, like Bentham, have been dismissive of natural rights, some of the most vocal advocates of animal rights today are utilitarians. As will be recalled, utilitarians have sometimes taken as their slogan: the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Since animals have the capacity to feel pleasure and displeasure, and can suffer, utilitarians today claim that animals feelings deserve to be included in the greatest number. They claim, for this reason, that animals have rights to have their happiness and unhappiness factored into our moral reasoning and decision-making. So they argue that governments ought to pass laws to secure animals rights. But someone could reply with the following response. If what the utilitarians claim about animals rights means only that human beings have the duty to take animals happiness and unhappiness seriously, then there is no reason to think that animals have rights. Remember, rights have four elements: (i) a subject, (ii) an object, (iii) others duties regarding the object, and (iv) the subject s permission. If we human beings have duties not to cause animals to suffer, then we are wrong to cause their suffering. But that, by itself, does not mean that animals have rights, or that we violate their rights by causing them to suffer. Whether animals have rights has more to do with the concept of rights than with the lives and experiences of animals. To say with certainty that animals have rights requires being certain about what rights are. Rights and the Social Contract Where do rights come from, if not from God? If they come from nature, how exactly does that work? The social contract theory offers an alternative explanation. It says that rights would emerge from the agreement of human beings to live together, and share the benefits of social interaction. Human beings initial recognition of rights may have arisen from their agreements about the use of land. It is hard to say with any degree of confidence, but when two people, or perhaps two families, first agreed to divide the land they shared, portioning it for their separate use, the seeds of the concept of property-rights must have been planted. The two parcels of land would then have been recognized as mine and yours, or ours and theirs, with the added thought that this is how it should be, and how it will continue to be. Then whenever it became necessary for one to remind the other of the old agreement, property-rights were on the horizon. The only condition still unfulfilled was a community that would put its united force behind the owner s claim, against the intruder. It must then have become evident to each one that he would be willing to use only his own property, provided others are willing to use only theirs; and that he would be willing to enforce the claims of any owner against an intruder, provided that others would also be willing to enforce his claim of ownership against an intruder. At that point, what we know in modern times as property-rights had emerged through the mechanism of the social contract. The social contract may also be construed hypothetically. That is, we can think of basic human rights, for example, liberty, as based on the social contract, even if no one actually 8
agreed to accept duties respecting others liberty, or to enforce compliance with those duties. The hypothetical version of the social contract supposes that rational people would agree to such arrangements, for their own benefit. So that is the same as they re actually having a right to liberty. It would be rational to accept the duty not to enslave others, provided others would accept that duty also; and it would be rational to permit enforcement of that duty, since that would help prevent one s own enslavement. Because this can be seen as obvious, the existence of rational human beings right to liberty (or right not to be enslaved) need not be traced to any actual agreement among them. One consequence of seeing rights as arising from the social contract is that it becomes impossible to have rights without also having duties. Having any right means that others have duties regarding the right s object. But on the contract theory, one cannot have any rights without agreeing to accept duties regarding the objects of others rights or without its being rational for one to do so, as in a hypothetical contract. This is why, in the contract theory, no one can have rights unless they also have duties. So if we cannot see how animals can have duties and it is hard to see how they can we cannot see how animals can have rights. But the same may be true for some human beings also, which is one of the weaknesses often pointed out for the contract theory. Chapter Summary This chapter has provided an outline of what rights are. A right is a relation between a subject and an object, where others have duties regarding the object, and where the subject has permission to enforce others compliance with those duties. Without the last-mentioned element of the rights relation there is no reason to describe the subject as having a right. It is enough to say only that others have the duties. The concept of rights was not well understood in ancient times. It seems to have emerged gradually, through people s thinking about the governing privileges of kings, and about ownership of property. The concept of unalienable human rights, as expressed in the American Declaration of Independence, crystalized in early modern times. These are rights seen as belonging to individual human beings, by their very nature. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, listed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as examples of unalienable rights. He said also that governments exist in order to secure these rights of their citizens. Here we see a relatively clear relation between morality and politics between ethics and governments and their laws. Human rights would be moral rights, because they do not depend upon the laws of any country s legal system. Legal rights would be rights created by legislation, within particular legal systems. Moral rights would be the same for all human beings; legal rights can be different for different people living in different countries. Ideally, every country would recognize the moral rights of human beings in its laws. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes world-wide recognition of these rights a goal of that organization. A question inevitably arises over whether human beings are the only species that can be subjects of rights. Considering what rights are, it is not clear that animals are capable of having them. But even so, this does not, by itself, mean that humans have no duties to animals, or that animal cruelty is not wrong. Finally, the social contract theory provides a clear and attractive way to understand where rights come from. Subjects of rights agree to accept duties to others regarding objects of rights, in exchange for the 9
benefit of others accepting comparable duties to them. They agree also to everyone s permissions to enforce compliance with those duties. A consequence of this explanation of how rights came to exist is that no one can have rights without also having duties. This is a version of the commonsense observation that rights always come with responsibilities. Where We Go from Here Rights are important fixtures of the moral world; and we all think of ourselves as having rights. This chapter showed, at the beginning, how the concept of rights arises from the concept of right action. The next chapter focuses on another important fixture of the moral world: the concept of virtue. This concept centers on the moral person, who can be judged good or bad. Almost all persons are certain they are good. The qualities of character recognized as making a person good are known as virtues. A few examples of virtues are honesty, kindness and fairness. Believing we have qualities like these supports our belief that we are good. Their opposites are called vices, which contribute to making a person less good, or bad. While rights were not well understood among ancient people, virtues were. Ancient philosophers tended to think of morality more in terms of virtues than in terms of right action. Today there has been a revival of interest in virtues and in the concept of virtue, along with renewed interest in the development of moral character. Ideas like making a person morally better, or like teaching children to be good persons, inevitably raise questions about what human psychology and learning are like. These will be subjects for the next chapter. Works Cited M. D. Lambert, Franciscan Poverty, The Doctrine of the Absolute Poverty of Christ and the Apostles in the Franciscan Order 1210-1323 (London: SPCK, 1961). Michael S. Lief and H. Mitchell Caldwell, You Have The Right To Remain Silent, The Strange Story Behind the Most Cited Case in American History: THE MIRANDA DECISION, American Heritage Magazine 57 (August/September 2006): 48-59. Terms Introduced Subjects of Rights: those who have rights human beings, generally; and possibly animals. Objects of Rights: what rights are rights to. Objects of privilege-rights are actions or activities. Objects of ownership-rights, or of property-rights, are things. Privilege-rights are revocable; ownership-rights are not. A Right: a relation between a subject and an object, where others have duties regarding the object, and the subject has permission to enforce others compliance with their duties, or to seek a remedy. Waiving a right: choosing not to enforce others compliance with their duties regarding objects of one s rights. Human Rights: rights belonging to all human beings, by their human nature. Unalienable Rights: rights that cannot be taken away, or given away: rights that cannot be alienated from a subject. Human rights would be unalienable (often spelled inalienable). Moral Rights: rights existing independently of laws or legal systems. Human rights would be moral rights. All human beings would have the same moral rights. 10
Legal Rights: rights established and enforced by governments and their laws. Citizens of different countries, under different legal systems, can have different legal rights. For example, same-sex couples have the legal right to marry in the United Sates, but not in China. Ideally, all legal systems would include legal rights that support moral rights. For example, assuming liberty is a moral right, all legal systems should include laws against slavery. Divine Right of Kings: historically, the privilege-right authorizing kings or queens to rule, supposedly given to them by God, and making them unequal to ordinary human beings. 11