Rights to Welfare and Other Benefits

Abstract

Whereas the natural rights we so far discussed were of a ‘negative’ or forbearance-oriented character, the rights we shall now consider have to do with ‘positive’ benefits of a material or financial kind. The right to welfare is a pre-eminent instance of this — a right, incidentally, now often described as a human right, although the actual difference between this and a natural right is usually left rather nebulous, unless it be that human rights are presumed to go beyond the traditional rights of man, to include various social or economic rights, such as a right to leisure or to holidays with pay, in fact rights now declared to appertain, more or less like positive rights, to all citizens, at any rate those within the United Nations.¹ As in these pages we try to delimit a tighter or strictly rational conception of natural rights, we shall continue to speak of a right to welfare as a natural one, preoccupied as we are with the question of how, or how far, such a right can itself be justified as tenable.