What Is A Right?
What constitutes a right and how does that deferiniate from your right to medical freedom (vaccinated or not.) How do you determine when a right obtains and pertains, how do you determine that in this current landscape? This subject would have never crossed my mind as a fleeting thought, but due to the culture climate that has uprooted many social standards and norms, I’m left wondering what are my rights.
People use rights in many different ways. A right to housing is very different to a right of free speech. Free speech means no one has the power to compel me to say anything. A right to housing means I can compel you to give me housing.
This is what Isaiah Berlin coined as “Positive Liberty” and “Negative Liberty.” Positive liberty may be understood as self-mastery. Berlin granted that both concepts of liberty represent valid human ideals, and that both forms of liberty are necessary in any free and civilised society. Berlin described a statement such as "I am slave to no man" as one of negative liberty, that is, freedom from another individual's direct interference. He contrasted this with a Positive Freedom statement such as "I am my own master", which lays claim to a freedom to choose one's own pursuits in life.
Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, a legal scholar that taught at Yale law school, broke down a four-part analysis of what he felt a Right should be. Hohfeld argued that right and duty are correlative concepts, i.e. the one must always be matched by a claim about the other. If A has a right against B, this is equivalent to B having a duty to honor A's right.
The first of the rights are Privileges. These are things that we don’t have a duty to do, i.e. I have a privilege not to eat a hamburger today. I have no moral duty to eat one, I have a privilege to decide whether or not to eat a hamburger. There is no moral duty to tell me to eat or not to eat that. “[A] privilege is one's freedom from the right or claim of another”
The second of the rights are Claims. This is a right that I can claim against you, i.e. If you have a duty to feed your child, your child has a claim against you because you have that duty to feed your kid. The violation of the child’s right is by not feeding that child who cannot feed them-self. A claim right is a right which entails responsibilities, duties, or obligations on other parties regarding the right-holder. In contrast, a liberty right is a right which does not entail obligations on other parties, but rather only freedom or permission for the right-holder.
The third of the rights are Powers. These are the ability of some overarching authority to change the nature of privileges and claims, i.e. An employer can order a contracted employee to stay late at work. An employer can’t force you to stay beyond a certain number of hours, but they can change your work duties if you’re contracted to your employer. “[A] power is one's affirmative ‘control’ over a given legal relation as against another”
The fourth of the rights are Immunity’s. This is where you say an institution does not have the power. This is what we are generally talking about when we talk about Vax mandates. You can say two things at once. I think in certain circumstances you probably have a moral duty to yourself and to others to get vaccinated. That is a different thing than to say the government has the power to compel you to get vaccinated. You have an immunity against the government because you don’t want to give the government the full-scale prudential authority to reshape how we all live for our own benefit. “[A]n immunity is one's freedom from the legal power or ‘control’ of another as regards some legal relation.”
You can say you have the immunity while having the privilege. You may have a moral duty to protect yourself and make yourself healthier, but if someone wishes for you to do something does not mean that your immunity is not valid. If they wish for you to do something, then they ought to compel it.
-Busy Brain