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The Concept of Rights

Its Justification, Language and Relation to Inequality

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Global Handbook of Inequality

Abstract

The chapter tries to grapple with the concept of rights and navigate through the intellectual debates among the rights’ scholars that have shaped and challenged our understanding of rights. It tries to do this by firstly unpacking the content of rights and explicating rights as claims, privileges, powers and immunities. It then tries to summarise the discussion about what rights are understood to bring about freedom, expression of will or interests and how these conceptions conflict and merge. The third section of the chapter looks at the historical emergence of the language of rights and its effect on how we conceptualise and re-conceptualise our understanding of rights. This is followed by the explanation of philosophical assumptions and their battle about what justifications may be said to correctly ground rights. The deontological, consequential and the recent efforts to combine these or find alternate justifications are also discussed. It then asks the question of what happens when rights conflict with other goods via the intellectual debates and closes with a brief highlight of the criticisms of the rights discourse and its limitations vis-a-vis questions of inequality.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Some authors have preferred the term liberties over privileges. For its use and discussion on terms, see Steiner (1996) and Thomson (1990).

  2. 2.

    Article 20 (3): No person accused of any offence shall be compelled to be a witness against himself.

  3. 3.

    H.L.A. Hart (1907–1992), English legal philosopher; Hans Kelsen (1881–1972), Austrian jurist and legal philosopher; Friedrich Carl Von Savigny (1779–1861), German jurist and historian.

  4. 4.

    Joseph (1939–2022) Israeli legal, moral and political philosopher; Caspar Rudolph von Jhering (1818–1892) German jurist; and John Austin (1790–1859) English legal theorist.

  5. 5.

    See Wenar (2017) for a detailed explanation of development and merits of the several functions theory.

  6. 6.

    Exclusionary and inclusionary here refer to finding justifications for rights outside of or within the legal jurisprudence.

  7. 7.

    Adolf Eichmann was a German military officer hanged by the state of Israel for his role in the extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust. (For the details of the trial, see https://www.britannica.com/biography/Adolf-Eichmann)

  8. 8.

    ‘The Grudge informer case’ refers to a wife having informed the Third Reich of her husband’s disapproving comments against the Reich. After the Nazi defeat, both the wife and the judge who had tried and sentenced her husband were indicted for unlawful restriction of another’s liberty. This case became the basis of an intellectual exchange between H.L.A. Hart and Lon L. Fuller. For the summary of the exchange, see Dyzenhaus (2008) (https://www.nyulawreview.org/issues/volume-83-number-4/the-grudge-informer-case-revisited/).

  9. 9.

    For a detailed explication, see Martin (2014).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, Telangana, India

    Anagha Ingole

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  1. Anagha Ingole
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Correspondence to Anagha Ingole .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru Univ, New Delhi, Delhi, India

    Surinder Singh Jodhka

  2. Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Boike Rehbein

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  1. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Daniel Bultmann

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Ingole, A. (2023). The Concept of Rights. In: Jodhka, S.S., Rehbein, B. (eds) Global Handbook of Inequality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97417-6_1-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97417-6_1-1

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