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Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement;
that is, rights are the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of
people or owed to people, according to some legal system, social convention, or
ethical theory.1 Rights are of essential importance in such disciplines as law
and ethics, especially theories of justice and deontology.
Rights are often
considered fundamental to civilization, being regarded as established pillars of
society and culture,2 and the history of social conflicts can be found in the
history of each right and its development. According to the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "rights structure the form of governments, the
content of laws, and the shape of morality as it is currently perceived."
Rights are often included in the foundational questions that governments and
politics have been designed to deal with. Often the development of these
socio-political institutions have formed a dialectical relationship with rights.
Rights about particular issues, or the rights of particular groups, are often
areas of special concern. Often these concerns arise when rights come into
conflict with other legal or moral issues, sometimes even other rights. Issues
of concern have historically included labor rights, LGBT rights, reproductive
rights, disability rights, patient rights and prisoners' rights. With increasing
monitoring and the information society, information rights, such as the right to
privacy are becoming more important.
Some examples of groups whose rights are
of particular concern include animals,5 and amongst humans, groups such as
children6 and youth, parents (both mothers and fathers), and men and women.7
Accordingly, politics plays an important role in developing or recognizing the
above rights, and the discussion about which behaviors are included as "rights"
is an ongoing political topic of importance. The concept of rights varies with
political orientation. Positive rights such as a "right to medical care" are
emphasized more often by left-leaning thinkers, while right-leaning thinkers
place more emphasis on negative rights such as the "right to a fair trial".
Further, the term equality which is often bound up with the meaning of "rights"
often depends on one's political orientation. Conservatives and libertarians and
advocates of free markets often identify equality with equality of opportunity,
and want equal and fair rules in the process of making things, while agreeing
that sometimes these fair rules lead to unequal outcomes. In contrast,
socialists often identify equality with equality of outcome and see fairness
when people have equal amounts of goods and services, and therefore think that
people have a right to equal portions of necessities such as health care or
economic assistance or housing.
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