by Michael Greaney

Created on: May 05, 2011

One of the most serious problems of modern society is that few persons have any idea what a "right" is, and why such a thing might be both more and less important than they suppose.  Take, for example, the seemingly trivial issue of whether people should be forced to wear seatbelts, and the claim that imposing legal sanctions against people who refuse to "buckle up" violates the right of anyone to do as he or she pleases with his or her own life and property.

The immediate reaction of a normal person in a democratic society is to jerk a knee and claim that any coercive act by the State or other duly constituted authority is, by that fact alone, a violation or infringement of individual rights.  "It's my life/property/body, and I can do as I please with it . . . can't I?"

This reaction, admittedly normal, shows a lack of understanding of just what a right is, as well as other critical concepts such as "person," and "society," to say nothing of humanity's special (possibly unique) characteristic of being (as Aristotle put it), "a political animal."  First, let's look at this concept we call "right."

A right is legally defined as the power vested in a person to do or not do some act in relation to others.  A right necessarily imposes a "duty" on those others to allow that act or non-act, that is, a "duty" is the essential "correlative" of a right.  Thus, a right cannot be exercised in a vacuum.  "Others" are necessary, or the right doesn't make any sense: there must be others on whom a duty is imposed.

Given the legal definition of right, we realize that "person" also has a special meaning: "that which has rights."  Persons can be "natural" (such as individual members of the human race), or they can be "artificial" (such as a State or a business corporation), but all persons have one thing in common: they have rights.  A natural person has rights by nature, while an artificial person only has those rights that natural persons have delegated to it, but the existence of rights is what defines something as a person, nothing else.

Right, duty and person are thus social concepts, that is, they only have meaning in the context in which other persons are present, i.e., "society."  Society alone, however, is not sufficient.  Humanity is not merely social.  Ants and herd animals are social creatures.  They have societies, that is, a structured environment within which members of that society carry out the business

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