What is the difference between rights and obligations

The rights structure the recognition of a number of rights means that equality and power are distributed, and so a certain understanding of what should and cannot be achieved can be endorsed.

This entry starts with the description of the type, structure, and functions of the rights. It then examines the past and relationships between rights and causes in terms of the vocabulary of rights. The general theoretical questions what rights are are central and not arguments about particular rights. It should be remembered that rights are dependent on negotiated behavior, obligations and mutual respect, and collaboration. A right is not just a statute that requires people or bodies to do or express anything that they like.

It is the basis or system on which society as a whole is structured and defined. It is one of the foundations which allows our society and our culture to be established. Government charges are imposed on imports and exports in the form of customs duty and other taxes, which are required by individuals and companies. Obligations, on the other hand, are our responsibilities as citizens or individuals of the society. This highlights that rights and obligations are at two interrelated, yet different parts in the social web.

This article will provide a clear understanding of the difference. A right can be defined as an entitlement to have or do something.

Rights allow people to be aware of what they are entitled to and what they are not entitled to do. In different societies and cultural groups, there are various rights.

These may be backed up by social, ethical or legal boundaries. When speaking of rights, a universal set of values applies to all human beings irrespective of nationality , sex , culture , religion , or ethnic group. These are known as human rights.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Article 1, Universal Declaration of Human Rights , Individuals and groups had rights to do various things — to hold markets, to graze animals on specific common lands — but these rights were specific to them as individuals.

They did not enjoy them because they were citizens, still less because they were human beings. Medieval society was a complex tapestry of such rights; rights which also often involved duties, such as providing monies or armed forces for their lord or king. The whole business of rights has in fact been a greater source of controversy than their currently fashionable acceptance would suggest.

Socialist thinkers were also, at least initially, less than enthusiastic about rights, particularly individual rights. Like Burke they tended to emphasise group rights, in this case the rights of the working class or trade unions.

In fact, it was tilted steeply against the working class, whose relative social and political weakness made bargaining with employers unequal.

Events in the twentieth century were to modify this belief drastically. Liberals were forced by the inter-war slump to realise that individualism was not enough. The experience of Soviet-style communism led the left, even the far left, to a reluctant acquiescence in recognising the importance of upholding individual rights as a defence against the might of totalitarian regimes. Human rights were espoused by the Vatican and adopted by the United Nations. Even the British, suspicious of legalistic positive rights, eventually incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into law.

The UK was the first to sign the Convention in and the last to adopt it as part of its domestic law in Ordinary speech soon translated wishes into the language of rights — the right to have children, to various forms of sexual experience, to foreign travel and to self-expression and discovery. Such language actually tended to debase the whole concept of rights and rob it of meaning.

Moreover, it soon became apparent that simply upholding rights was by no means an uncontentious formula for government action. Rights became highly contentious, as it soon became apparent that there was no universal agreement as to what specific legal or civil rights there should be.

Many other controversial issues spring to mind. Are rights absolute? Does the right to life extend to all persons in all circumstances? If one has a right to life, does one also have the right to end it? Where do the right to freedom of speech end and the right to privacy, and to freedom from racial harassment, begin? If anything, an appeal to alleged rights does not end controversy; it merely gives it a powerful emotional charge.

Further difficulties have arisen as philosophers have tried to establish the rational basis of human rights. In fact, animal rights campaigners question the entire legitimacy of a political system based on rights that apply only to humans. At this point it might be useful to distinguish between various kinds of rights. Four types can be suggested:. They are a gift from God or nature to every human being.

The state is the guardian of such rights, not the creator of them. To deprive human beings of such rights is therefore morally wrong. Governments are obliged to uphold these rights; if a government does not, it acts immorally. The most articulate early exponent of this view was John Locke, writing in the late seventeenth century. The framers of the American Constitution further assumed that limited government would be in practice essential if rights were to be preserved.

Legal rights are those which are enforceable in courts of law. These may derive from natural rights but are not identical to them. Thus, for example, a child might be said to have the human right to life, but not the legal right to vote or dispose of property. The term civil rights is sometimes applied to legal rights but more often refers to rights which do not actually exist in law but which in some sense ought to exist, or to rights which may exist on paper but not in reality.

Civil rights are held to be essential for the satisfactory functioning of society. Thus the civil rights movement in America in the s campaigned for non-discrimination towards African-Americans in education, transport and restaurant facilities. Welfare rights include the right to employment, education and adequate healthcare.

As has been suggested, the liberal approach to rights, exemplified by Locke and, later, J. Mill, assumes that the greatest potential threat to rights is the state — the state whose prime function ought to be the very protection of these rights. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though, many thinkers had come to regard this fear of the state as misplaced. The real threat to vast numbers of people, they argued, is not the state but powerful institutions and ingrained economic and social forces before which the ordinary citizen is powerless.

This understanding implied a positive role for the state as the guarantor and even provider of welfare rights. This new conception of rights has had a major influence on the European Union. The reappraisal of rights and the role of the state in providing them have not been without controversy. The implicit assumption is that rights need to be balanced by duties.

Historically, the left has been more anxious to stress rights; nowadays even the liberal left has focused on duties. This belief derives partly from a reaction to the rampant individualism of the Thatcher years. Another source of this belief is an analysis of the weaknesses of the former communist regimes of Eastern Europe, regimes in which there were no intermediate stages, no buffer, between the state and the individual.

Since both the Labour and Conservative parties in Britain have stressed the need for people to recognise their public duties and to act upon this recognition. As with rights, the terms duties and obligations cover a number of rather different concepts, which may be summarised as follows:.

Moral obligations are the things people ought to do because in some sense they owe such actions to God, to others or to themselves. Rights and responsibilities are often complementary and one is the derivation of the other.

Take it in this way, the constitution gives the citizens the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, in return, the citizens have the responsibility of supporting and defending the constitution.

If we have a proper look, then we see that one can not stand without the other. If the constitution did not grant the rights of freedom to the citizens, it would end up in an unsatisfied and unhappy society, which would eventually descend into anarchy, hence there is the right to freedom. Now that the constitution has given the citizens this right, the citizens strive to maintain the constitution, as its collapse would result in a state of anarchy again.

Thus rights and responsibilities, even though significantly different, are necessary and complementary to each other. They are opposite sides of the same coin. However, the main beneficiary of these responsibilities is society at large. Nobody is above the law and hence when anybody serves the constitution, they do not serve any single individual or any group of individuals.

They support the people who made this constitution, the people.