The Language of Rights

The French jurist Karel Vasak has categorized three generations of human rights in Western and United Nations history:

• First generation rights include civil and political freedoms, such as those associated with the U.S. Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.
• Second generation rights include socio-economic and cultural rights, such as rights involving work (hours, rest, leisure, and social security), basic health care, education, and copyright law.
• Third generation rights, sometimes called solidarity rights, are associated with Third World involvement in the U.N. These include the right to self-determination, economic development, an ecologically clean environment, freedom from war, and disaster relief (Montgomery 28-30).

Each of these has an investment in the larger vision of shalom, which is finally a vision of both responsibilities and rights together, though I think one can argue whether all of them are truly "rights" or should be enshrined in law. John Witte, Jr in a basic introduction to the history of rights in the West lists the following categories currently under discussion:

1. Public or constitutional rights versus private or personal rights
2. Individual rights versus rights of associations and groups
3. Human rights (human qua human) versus civil rights (humans as citizens)
4. Natural rights (i.e. based in nature or natural law) versus positive rights (i.e. based in state law)
5. Unalienable or non-derogable rights versus alienable or derogable rights
6. Historic rights versus extension of these to parties and groups traditionally disenfranchised
7. Vasak's three generations
8. Rights vested in the subject versus rights vested in the sense of rightness, that is a properly ordered, external standard.

Likewise, Witte suggests that some wish to distinguish:

a. rights, which can trigger corresponding duties in others, from privileges that no one may interfere with.
b. active capacity to do or assert a right versus passive entitlement to a claim on others.
c. privileges (i.e. claims, entitlements) from liberties (i.e. immunities, protections from interference.)
d. postive freedom, the right or ability to be something, from negative freedom, the right to be left alone in some dimension of life)