Claim rights and liberty rights
 | It has been suggested that this article be merged with Liberty right, Talk:Claim right and [[:{{subst:2008-02-20}}|{{subst:2008-02-20}}]]. (Discuss) |
 |
A claim right is a right which entails responsibilities or duties for other parties. For instance, if someone has the claim right to the effect that others may not take away his own property, inherently there follows the duty of other parties not to take away his property. By contrast, a liberty right is a right which does not entail duties for other parties.
In the terms of deontic logic, a liberty right to x is permission for one to do or have x, while a claim right to x is an obligation on others to allow, enable or provide x. For example, to assert a liberty right to free speech is to assert that you have permission to speak freely; that is, that you are not doing anything wrong by speaking freely. But that liberty right does not in itself entail that others would be wrong in preventing you from speaking freely. To say the latter would be to assert a claim right to free speech; to assert that others are obliged to refrain (i.e. prohibited) from preventing you from speaking freely, that is, that it would be wrong for them to do so. Likewise, such claim rights do not necessarily imply liberty rights; e.g. laws prohibiting vigilante justice (establishing a legal claim right to be free thereof) do not thereby condone or permit all the acts which such violent enforcement might otherwise have prevented.
A world with only liberty rights, without any claim rights, would by definition be a world wherein everything was permitted and no act or omission was prohibited; a world wherein none could rightly claim that they had been wronged. Conversely, a world with only claim rights and no liberty rights would be a world wherein nothing was merely permitted, but all acts were either obligatory or prohibited. The assertion that people have a claim right to liberty - that is, that people are obliged to refrain from preventing each other from doing things which are permissible - is the central thesis of liberal theories of justice.
The distinction between liberty rights and claim rights should not be confused for the distinction between negative and positive rights. Both liberty and claim rights come in positive and negative varieties: your permission to do something is a positive liberty right, your permission to refrain from something is a negative liberty right, another's obligation to do something for you is a positive claim right, and another's obligation to refrain from doing something to you is a negative claim right.