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. Rights are of essential importance in such disciplines as law and ethics, especially theories of justice and deontology.
Rights are often considered fundamental to civilization, being regarded as established pillars of society and culture, and the history of social conflicts can be found in the history of each right and its development. 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." The connection between rights and struggle cannot be overstated — rights are not as much granted or endowed as they are fought for and claimed, and the essence of struggles past and ancient are encoded in the spirit of current concepts of rights and their modern formulations.
Read more about Rights: Definitional Issues, Rights and Politics, Etymology, History of Rights
Other articles related to "rights":
... When he sold film rights to The Graduate, he surrendered the rights to any sequels ... If he were to publish Home School, Canal+, the French media company that owns the rights to The Graduate, would be able to adapt it for the screen without his permission ... was a possibility he would find a publisher for the full text, provided he could retrieve the film rights using French copyright law ...
... See also History of human rights The specific enumeration of rights has differed greatly in different periods of history ... In many cases, the system of rights promulgated by one group has come into sharp and bitter conflict with that of other groups ... In the political sphere, a place in which rights have historically been an important issue, at present the question of who has what legal rights is ...
... Villard, and dedicated to campaigning for civil rights, equal voting rights, and equal educational opportunities ... skinned people everywhere." Dozens of civil rights supporters, black and white, participated in the founding, but most executive officers were white, including Mary Ovington, Charles Edward Russell ...
... Main article International Day of the World's Indigenous People The International Day of the World's Indigenous People falls on 9 August as this was the date of the first meeting in 1982 of the United Nations Working Group of Indigenous Populations of the Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities of the Commission on Human Rights. ...
... beliefs and recognizing their inviolable rights ... Eighth To completely uphold the principals of Basic Human Rights as laid down by religion the United Nations and International Institutions ... agricultural and commercial sectors while maintaining a balance between the rights of ownership and the free market and the rights of the people to social justice equal opportunity and basic amenities ...
Famous quotes containing the word rights:
“Is a Bill of Rights a security for [religious liberty]? If there were but one sect in America, a Bill of Rights would be a small protection for liberty.... Freedom derives from a multiplicity of sects, which pervade America, and which is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“Whilst the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in property are very unequal. One man owns his clothes, and another owns a country.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)