Rights

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 an important concept in law and ethics, especially theories of justice and deontology.

The history of social conflicts has often involved attempts to define and redefine rights.

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".

For example, a person has a liberty right to walk down a sidewalk and can decide freely whether or not to do so, since there is no obligation either to do so or to refrain from doing so.

A classic instance in which group and individual rights clash is conflicts between unions and their members.

[citation needed] The Austrian School of Economics holds that only individuals think, feel, and act whether or not members of any abstract group.

[citation needed] Similarly, the author Ayn Rand argued that only individuals have rights, according to her philosophy known as Objectivism.

Rights are often included in the foundational questions that governments and politics have been designed to deal with.

[citation needed] Further, the term equality which is often bound up with the meaning of "rights" often depends on one's political orientation.

In contrast, socialists see the power imbalance of employer-employee relationships in capitalism as a cause of inequality and often see unequal outcomes as a hindrance to equality of opportunity.

", thus endorsing some ethical evaluations and rejecting others, meta-ethics addresses questions such as "What is goodness?"

painting of dark gray skies with trees and water, and a human image, flying, with arms outstretched
According to some views, certain rights derive from deities or nature .
Soldiers lined up in a row, with green caps, carrying rifles
Do groups have rights ? Some argue that when soldiers bond in combat , the group becomes like an organism in itself and has rights which trump the rights of any individual soldier.
three police officers surround a man in a tee shirt who is handcuffed
Police officers in the United States are required to read the Miranda warning between making an arrest and beginning an interrogation. The warning informs the person arrested that they have rights included in the Fifth Amendment. Failure to "read Miranda" disqualifies evidence obtained primarily in the questioning.
Magna Carta or "The Great Charter" was one of England's first documents containing commitments by a king to his people to respect certain legal rights. It reduced the power of the monarch.
Picture of a painting; the painting is of a written declaration; there are two human images to the left and right; it says "Declaration des droits de l'homme" (declaration of the rights of man)
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 in France