DISCLAIMER: This is taken from the context of “Zeroglyph” by Vance Pravat. The following could be a good quote, or a bad quote, but is nevertheless a QUOTE. Please, don’t talk me in in this discussion.

”What I have is a decision procedure or a framework, rather than a full-fledged theory of rights. I’ll limit the rights to a core set of four: the right not to be deprived of life or existence; the right not to be deprived of liberty; the right not to have one’s body and products of that body – which could be labor, speech, ideas, property, etc. – appropriated without consent; and finally, the Kantian right not to be used as a means to an end. These rights are what one rational, moral creature owes another.

Some definitions first. In this treatment, rights and duties are two sides of the same coin. Rights imply duties and duties imply rights. The four rights I mentioned are negative rights, which means they prohibit an agent from performing certain actions on the holder of the right. Each of the rights is associated with a corresponding hard duty. Your negative right to life implies others have a hard moral duty not to kill you. Your negative right to liberty means others have a hard moral duty not to imprison you or restrict you in any way unless you yourself are in violation of rights. Apart from the core rights, there are secondary rights. These rights are associated with soft duties. Your right to be aided is one such, and correspondingly, others have a soft duty to help you. In the decision procedure, secondary rights are not binding, but core rights are.

(NOTE: The following answer the question asked:) As a moral being, I have a duty to help you, but the duty is not an obligation. In contrast, I am under a strict obligation not to push you into the water. If everyone respected everyone else’s rights, if people didn’t kill and steal and lie, the world wouldn’t be in need of so much help.

A right to be aided cannot be obligatory because the discharge of the corresponding duty will result in inevitable conflicts with the hard duties. If the right to be aided is obligatory, one could justify killing someone in order to help someone else, like the doctor who harvests organs from a healthy patient to save five terminally ill patients. It will lead to a self-defeating philosophy.”

Topics: law, justice, law enforcement, justice system, morality, ethics, right, rights, intent, deviation