In the last article, we showed that children are harmed when adults sever them from their mother or father and then call the arrangement a right. But that raises a deeper question: when people use the language of rights, what do they actually mean, and how do we tell a real right from a political slogan?
Rights talk today is badly confused. Pick almost any social cause and someone will invoke a right to it.
Traditionally, rights referred to the protected liberties a person may properly enjoy. Today, the language has swollen to include claimed rights to internet access, affordable housing, free tertiary education, and free medical care.
Many also speak of a “right to do what one wishes with and to one’s body” to justify abortion on demand, a right to marry whomever one chooses to justify homosexual marriage, and a “right to die” to justify euthanasia.
To sort through the confusion, we need one simple distinction drawn by an American jurist more than a century ago.
In this article, we use Wesley Hohfeld’s theory of rights to show why so much modern rights talk collapses under scrutiny. In the next, I turn to the deeper question of what a real moral right actually is.
Hohfeldian Rights
More than a century ago, legal scholar Wesley Hohfeld made a simple but powerful point: not every “right” is the same kind of thing.
Sometimes, when people speak of a right, they mean that someone else owes them a duty. This is what Hohfeld called a claim-right. If John has a right to be paid $500 by Jane under a contract, Jane has a corresponding duty to pay him.
At other times, people use the language of rights to mean that they are simply free to do something without interference. This is what Hohfeld called a liberty. If John is free to walk down the street, that does not mean others owe him help. A liberty also means others have no right to interfere, but crucially, no duty to assist either.
That distinction matters. A claim-right places another person under an obligation. A liberty does not. It merely means one is free to act without being wrongfully obstructed.
This is where modern rights-talk often becomes confused. People invoke a “right” without clarifying whether they mean that others must provide, permit, or refrain. But those are very different claims, and each carries different implications.
Once we make that distinction, many fashionable rights claims begin to look far less coherent than they first appear.
The Problem with Modern ‘Rights’
Take the claim that a person has a “right” to decide what happens in and to his own body. This is often used to defend abortion. But once we apply Hohfeld’s distinction, the claim becomes much less clear.
If this is meant as a claim-right, it would mean that others have a duty not to act upon someone’s body without consent. But taken seriously, that principle seems to reach much further than abortion. It could imply that others must not resuscitate the unconscious, that doctors must stand aside while injured patients bleed out, or that the state may never compel citizens to risk their bodies even in national defence.
Perhaps, then, what is meant is not a claim-right but a liberty: the freedom to do as one wishes with one’s own body without interference. But this too creates difficulty. Does such a liberty include refusing to save one’s drowning child? Selling oneself into slavery? Consenting to torture? Most people would instinctively recoil from these conclusions. That suggests that bodily autonomy cannot be absolute, and that there are moral limits even where consent is present.
The Right to Die
The same problem appears in arguments for a “right to die”. If this is a claim-right, then it is hard to see why it should apply only to the terminally ill. Why would not every healthy person also have a right to obtain help in dying, and a corresponding claim against the state not to interfere? Yet most advocates of euthanasia do not want to say that.
Perhaps, then, the “right to die” is meant as a liberty. But that would imply a freedom to seek death by whatever means one chooses, and with the help of whoever is willing to assist. Again, this goes far beyond what most supporters of euthanasia are prepared to defend.
That is the problem. These modern rights claims are rarely stated with enough precision to withstand scrutiny. Once translated into clear moral and legal terms, they either become far broader than their advocates intend, or collapse into implications they themselves would reject.
This should make us pause. Perhaps the reason these claims shock the conscience when pushed to their logical end is that human life is not a disposable possession. It is something inviolable. In the next article, we will turn to that deeper question and ask what a real moral right is, and what goods rights actually exist to protect.
Once we make these distinctions, much of modern rights-talk starts to look less like moral clarity and more like rhetorical inflation. People invoke rights to give moral prestige to claims that are often confused, unstable, or far broader than they are willing to admit.
That is why clarity matters. Not every strong desire becomes a right. Not every legal permission reflects a moral truth. And not every claim made in the language of rights deserves recognition.
In the next article, we’ll move from exposing false rights claims to answering the deeper question: what is a real moral right, and what human goods are rights actually meant to protect?
