Rights

In plain terms

A right is a claim that holds even when it is inconvenient for everyone else. That is its whole function: it stops a majority doing something to a minority by outvoting them.

Which immediately raises the question of what makes such a claim stick. If a right exists because a legislature enacted it, the legislature can repeal it, and the protection is only as good as the current majority. If it exists prior to any enactment, then it is a strange kind of thing - a fact about a person that no one made and everyone must respect.

Bentham's verdict on the second was that natural rights are nonsense, and imprescriptible natural rights nonsense upon stilts. The reply is that the alternative leaves nothing standing between a person and a determined government, which is a practical argument rather than a metaphysical one.

As a philosopher would put it

Hohfeld's analysis distinguishes four positions run together in ordinary talk: claim-rights, with correlative duties; liberties, where no duty to refrain exists; powers, to alter legal relations; and immunities, from having them altered.

The justificatory dispute is between will and interest theories. Will theories make a right a protected choice, so the holder must be capable of waiving it - which excludes infants and the comatose. Interest theories make it a protected interest, which includes them and admits far more candidates.

The generational division separates civil and political rights, standardly negative and immediately enforceable, from economic and social rights, which require resources and progressive realisation. Critics argue the distinction does not hold, since property rights require enormous state expenditure on courts and police. And the postcolonial critique presses that a universal framework drafted by a small set of states and enforced selectively is not obviously the neutral instrument it presents itself as.

What is actually disputed

Whether rights need a foundation.

Foundationalists hold that a right without a ground is a claim without backing, revisable by whoever holds power, and that the twentieth century supplies the evidence. Pragmatists reply that overlapping consensus is what actually protects people, and that demanding agreement on grounds would have prevented the Declaration and everything built on it.

A second dispute concerns proliferation. If rights are trumps, then multiplying them turns every policy question into a clash of absolutes with no way to weigh them - which critics say devalues the core protections. Defenders reply that the alternative is deciding in advance which interests are too minor to protect.

And the enforcement problem is untouched by either. A right without a body able and willing to vindicate it is, as Arendt observed of stateless people, precisely what it was supposed to guarantee against.