Rights and
Responsibilities in History
To understand the historical importance of their
topics, students must ask questions of time and place, cause and effect, change
over time, and impact and significance. They must ask not only when events
happened but also why they happened and what impact they had. What factors
contributed to their development? Regardless of the topic selected, students must
not only present a description of it, but also draw conclusions about how their
topic affected individuals, communities, nations, or the world.
People live their lives in a web of connections with other human beings.
Within that web they have rights and responsibilities as members of families,
as participants in politics, as producers or consumers, or in any of the other
myriad roles human beings assume during their lifetimes.Historically, rights have taken many different forms. America's founders believed that individuals had certain fundamental rights, simply by virtue of being human. In other societies, rights depended on membership in a group or class, such as the castes of Brahmin India. Throughout history, human institutions-governments, churches, corporations, and other entities-have enjoyed rights as well. With rights come responsibilities, whether it is to exercise rights within limits or to ensure rights for others. While students may be tempted to focus on rights, the theme includes both rights and responsibilities and students should address both aspects of the theme whenever possible.
Students may explore
§ the
origins and impact of key documents related to rights
§ specific
rights
§ the
rights and responsibilities conferred by citizenship
§ the
rights and responsibilities of family members
§ examine
the experiences of different groups
§ the
denial of rights and the struggle to gain rights
§ the
rights and responsibilities of nations and governments
§ topics
related to religion and churches
§ the
economy
§ science
and technology
The theme is a broad one, so topics should be carefully selected and
developed in ways that best use students' talents and abilities. Whether a
topic is a well-known event in world history or focuses on a little-known
individual from a small community, students should be careful to place their
topics into historical perspective, examine the significance of their topics in
history, and show development over time. Studies should include an
investigation into available primary and secondary sources, analysis of the
evidence, and a clear explanation of the relationship of the topic to the
theme, "Rights and Responsibilities in History." Then, students may
develop papers, performances, documentaries, and exhibits for entry into
National History Day competitions.
Related Links
National Archives and Records Administration http://www.nara.gov/education/historyday/history.html
Rights and
Responsibilities
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."[1]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.
Definition of issues
Rights are
widely regarded as the basis of law, but what if laws are bad? Some theorists
suggest civil disobedience is, itself, a right, and it was advocated by
thinkers such as Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
There is considerable disagreement
about what is meant precisely by the term rights.
It has been used by different groups and thinkers for different purposes, with
different and sometimes opposing definitions, and the precise definition of
this principle, beyond having something to do with normative rules of some sort
or another, is controversial.
One way to get an idea of the multiple
understandings and senses of the term is to consider different ways it is used.
Many diverse things are claimed as rights:
“
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A right to
life, a right to choose; a right to vote, to work, to strike; a right to one
phone call, to dissolve parliament, to operate a forklift, to asylum, to
equal treatment before the law, to feel proud of what one has done; a right
to exist, to sentence an offender to death, to launch a nuclear first strike,
to carry a concealed weapon, to a distinct genetic identity; a right to
believe one's own eyes, to pronounce the couple husband and wife, to be left
alone, to go to hell in one's own way.
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”
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There are likewise diverse possible
ways to categorize rights, such as:
“
|
Who is alleged to
have the right: Children's rights, animal rights, workers' rights, states'
rights, the rights of peoples? What actions or states or objects the asserted right pertains to:
Rights of free expression, to pass judgment; rights of privacy, to remain
silent; property rights, bodily rights? Why the rightholder (allegedly) has the
right: Moral rights spring from moral reasons, legal rights derive from the
laws of the society, customary rights are aspects of local customs? How
the asserted right can be affected by
the rightholder's actions: The inalienable right to life, the forfeitable
right to liberty, and the waivable right that a promise be kept?”
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There has been considerable debate
about what this term means within the academic community, particularly within
fields such as philosophy, law, deontology, logic,
and political science.
Natural
rights versus legal rights
·
Natural rights are rights which
are "natural" in the sense of "not artificial, not
man-made", as in rights deriving from human
nature,
or from the edicts of a god. They are universal; that is, they
apply to all people, and do not derive from the laws of any specific society.
They exist necessarily, inhere in every individual, and can't be taken away.
For example, it has been argued that humans have a natural right to life. They're
sometimes called moral rights or inalienable rights.
·
Legal rights, in contrast, are based on a society's
customs, laws, statutes or actions by legislatures. An example of
a legal right is the right to
vote of citizens. Citizenship, itself, is
often considered as the basis for having legal rights, and has been defined as
the "right to have rights". Legal rights are sometimes called civil
rights or statutory rights and are culturally and politically relative since they depend on a
specific societal context to have meaning.
Some thinkers see rights in only one
sense while others accept that both senses have a measure of validity. There
has been considerable philosophical debate about these senses throughout
history. For example, Jeremy Bentham believed that legal rights were the
essence of rights, and he denied the existence of natural rights; whereas Thomas Aquinas held that rights purported by positive law but not grounded in natural law were not properly rights at all, but
only a facade or pretense of rights.
Claim
rights versus liberty rights
A deed is an example of
a claim right in the sense that it asserts a right to own land. This particular deed
dates back to 1273.
·
A claim right is a right which entails that another
person has a duty to the right-holder. Somebody else must do or refrain from
doing something to or for the claim
holder, such as perform a service or supply a product for him or her; that
is, he or she has acclaim to
that service or product (another term is thing
in action).
In logic, this idea can be expressed as: "Person A has a claim that person B do something if and only if B has a duty to A to do that something." Every
claim-right entails that some other duty-bearer must do some duty for the claim
to be satisfied. This duty can be to act or to refrain from acting. For
example, many jurisdictions recognize broad claim rights to things like
"life, liberty, and property"; these rights impose an obligation upon
others not to assault or
restrain a person, or use their property, without the claim-holder's
permission. Likewise, in jurisdictions where social welfare services are
provided, citizens have legal claim rights to be provided with those services
·
A liberty right or privilege,
in contrast, is simply a freedom or permission for the right-holder to do
something, and there are no
obligations on other parties
to do or not do anything. This can be expressed in logic as: "Person A has a privilege to do something if and
only if A has no duty not to do that
something." For example, if a person has a legal liberty right to free
speech, that merely means that it is not legally forbidden for them to speak
freely: it does not mean that anyone has to help enable
their speech, or to listen to their speech; or even, per se, refrain from
stopping them from speaking, though other rights, such as the claim right to be
free from assault, may severely limit what others can do to stop them.
Liberty rights and claim rights are
the inverse of one another: a person has a liberty right permitting him to do
something only if there is no other person who has a claim right forbidding him
from doing so. Likewise, if a person has a claim right against someone else,
then that other person's liberty is limited. For example, a person has a liberty right to walk down a sidewalk and can decide
freely whether or not to do so, since there is no obligation either to do so or
to refrain from doing so. But pedestrians may have an obligation not to walk on
certain lands, such as other people's private property, to which those other
people have a claim right. So a person's liberty
right of walking extends
precisely to the point where another's claim
right limits his or her
freedom.
Positive
rights versus negative rights.
In one sense, a right is a permission
to do something or an entitlement to a specific service or treatment, and these
rights have been called positive
rights. However, in another sense, rights may allow or require inaction,
and these are called negative
rights; they permit or require doing nothing. For example, in some
democracies e.g. the US, citizens have the positive
right to vote and they have
the negative right not to vote; people can choose not to
vote in a given election. In other democracies e.g. Australia, however, citizens have a
positive right to vote but they don't have a negative right to not vote, since
non-voting citizens can be fined. Accordingly:
·
Positive rights are permissions
to do things, or entitlements to be done unto. One example of a positive right
is the purported "right to welfare.
·
Negative rights are permissions
not to do things, or entitlements to be left alone. Often the distinction is
invoked by libertarians who think of a negative right as an entitlement to
"non-interference" such as a right against being assaulted
Though similarly named, positive and
negative rights should not be confused with active
rights (which encompass
"privileges" and "powers") and passive rights (which encompass "claims"
and "immunities").
Individual
rights versus group rights
The general concept of rights is that
they are possessed by individuals in the sense that they are permissions and
entitlements to do things which other persons, or which governments or
authorities, can not infringe. This is the understanding of people such as the
author Ayn Rand who
argued that only individuals have rights, according to her philosophy known as Objectivism.[4] However,
others have argued that there are situations in which a group of persons is
thought to have rights, or group
rights. Accordingly:
·
Individual rights are rights held
by individual people regardless of their group membership or lack thereof.
Do groups have rights? Some argue that when
soldiers bond in combat, the group
becomes like an organism in itself and has rights which trump the rights of any
individual soldier.
·
Group rights have been argued
to exist when a group is seen as more than a mere composite or assembly of
separate individuals but an entity in its own right. In other words, it's possible
to see a group as a distinct being in and of itself; it's akin to an enlarged
individual which has a distinct will and power of action and can be thought of
as having rights. For
example, a platoon of soldiers in combat can be thought
of as a distinct group, since individual members are willing to risk their
lives for the survival of the group, and therefore the group can be conceived
as having a "right" which is superior to that of any individual
member; for example, a soldier who disobeys an officer can be punished, perhaps
even killed, for a breach of obedience. But there is another sense of group
rights in which people who are members of a group can be thought of as having
specific individual rights because of their membership in a group. In this
sense, the set of rights which individuals-as-group-members have is expanded
because of their membership in a group. For example, workers who are members of
a group such as a labor
union can be thought
of as having expanded individual rights because of their membership in the
labor union, such as the rights to specific working conditions or wages. As
expected, there is sometimes considerable disagreement about what exactly is
meant by the term "group" as well as by the term "group rights.
There can be tension between
individual and group rights. A classic instance in which group and individual
rights clash is conflicts between unions and their members. For example,
individual members of a union may wish a wage higher than the union-negotiated
wage, but are prevented from making further requests; in a so-called closed shop which has a union security
agreement, only the union has a right to decide matters for the individual
union members such as wage rates. So, do the supposed "individual
rights" of the workers prevail about the proper wage? Or do the
"group rights" of the union regarding the proper wage prevail?
Clearly this is a source of tension.
Other senses
Other senses
Other distinctions between rights draw
more on historical association or family resemblance than on precise philosophical
distinctions. These include the distinction between civil and
political rights and economic,
social and cultural rights, between which the articles of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights are
often divided. Another conception of rights groups them into three
generations. These distinctions have much overlap with that
between negative
and positive rights, as well as between individual rights and group rights, but these groupings are not
entirely coextensive.
Rights and politics
In the United
States,
persons who are going to be questioned by police when they are in police
custody must be read their "Miranda rights". The Miranda
warning
assumes people don't understand what their rights are so it requires police
officers to read a statement to people being arrested which informs them that
they have certain rights, such as the right to remain silent and the right to
have an attorney.
Rights are often included in the
foundational questions that governments and politics have been designed to deal
with. Often the development of these socio-political institutions have formed a
dialectical relationship with rights.
Rights about particular issues, or the
rights of particular groups, are often areas of special concern. Often these
concerns arise when rights come into conflict with other legal or moral issues,
sometimes even other rights. Issues of concern have historically included labor rights, LGBT rights, reproductive rights, disability rights, patient rights and prisoners' rights.
With increasing monitoring and the information society, information rights, such as the right to privacy are
becoming more important.
Some examples of groups whose rights
are of particular concern include animals,[5] and
amongst humans, groups such as children[6]and youth, parents (both mothers and fathers),
and men and women.[7]
Accordingly, politics plays an
important role in developing or recognizing the above rights, and the
discussion about which behaviors are included as "rights" is an ongoing
political topic of importance. The concept of rights varies with political
orientation. Positive rights such as a "right to medical care" are
emphasized more often by left-leaning thinkers, while right-leaning thinkers
place more emphasis on negative rights such as the "right to a fair
trial".
Further, the term equality which is often bound up with the
meaning of "rights" often depends on one's political
orientation. Conservatives and libertarians and advocates of free markets often identify equality with equality of
opportunity, and want equal and fair rules in the process of making
things, while agreeing that sometimes these fair rules lead to unequal
outcomes. In contrast, socialist soften identify equality with equality of outcome and see fairness when people have
equal amounts of goods and services, and therefore think that people have a
right to equal portions of necessities such as health care or economic assistance or housing