For those political thinkers who classify distinct categories of rights, negative rights are those rights that entitle a person to be let alone in one manner or another. They are rights that are instantiated in the form of rights to noninterference. If a person has a negative right, that person has the right to be free to do some action or to do no action. They are to be free from the interference of another person or group of persons. Usually, negative rights views focus on rights of a citizen to noninterference on the part of their government.
Negative rights can include, but certainly are not limited to, freedoms such as the right to choose what to do for a living, whether to buy one brand of cereal or another, the right to buy and sell property, the right not to be killed or maimed, the right to keep what one earns, the right not to be enslaved, the right to pursue what one thinks is best for oneself, the right to speak freely, and the right to make one’s own moral decisions.
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Capone, S.F. (2011). Negative Rights. In: Chatterjee, D.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_338
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