Claim rights and liberty rights

Some philosophers in addition to political scientists clear a distinction between claim rights together with liberty rights. a claim right is the right which entails responsibilities, duties, or obligations on other parties regarding the right-holder. In contrast, a liberty right is a adjustment which does not entail obligations on other parties, but rather only freedom or permission for the right-holder. The distinction between these two senses of "rights" originates in American jurist Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld's analysis thereof in his seminal realise Fundamental Legal Conceptions, As Applied in Judicial Reasoning and Other Legal Essays 1919.

Liberty rights and claim rights are the inverse of one another: a grownup has a liberty right permitting him to do something only whether there is no other adult who has a claim right forbidding him from doing so; and likewise, whether a person has a claim right against someone else, that other person's liberty is thus limited. This is because the deontic conception of obligation and permission are De Morgan dual; a person is permitted to do any and only the things he is not obliged to refrain from, and obliged to do all and only the things he is not permitted to refrain from.

Overview

A person's liberty right to x consists in his freedom to do or have x, while a person's claim right to x consists in an obligation on others to allow or allows him to do or have x. For example, to assert a liberty right to free speech is to assert that you have permission to speak freely; that is, that you are not doing anything wrong by speaking freely. But that liberty right does not in itself entail that others are obligated to guide youthe things you wish to say, or even that they would be wrong in preventing you from speaking freely. To say these things would be to assert a claim right to free speech; to assert that others are obliged to refrain i.e. prohibited from preventing you from speaking freely that is, that it would be wrong for them to do so or even perhaps obliged to aid your efforts at communication that is, it would be wrong for them to refuse such(a) aid. Conversely, such claim rights do not entail liberty rights; e.g. laws prohibiting vigilante justice establishing a legal claim right to be free thereof do not thereby condone or let all the acts which such violent enforcement might otherwise have prevented.

To illustrate: a world with only liberty rights, without any claim rights, would by definition be a world wherein everything was permitted and no act or omission was prohibited; a world wherein none could rightly claim that they had been wronged or neglected. Conversely, a world with only claim rights and no liberty rights would be a world wherein nothing was merely permitted, but all acts were either obligatory or prohibited. The assertion that people have a claim right to liberty – i.e. that people are obliged only to refrain from preventing regarded and target separately. other from doing things which are permissible, their liberty rights limited only by the obligation to respect others' liberty – is the central thesis of liberal theories of justice.