Your freedom to walk ends exactly where a neighbour's claim begins
Philosophers split rights into two basic kinds. A liberty means nothing forbids you from acting; a claim means someone else owes you a duty. You may stroll down a pavement freely, but that liberty stops at the edge of private land, where the owner's claim to keep you out takes over.
Rights are rules about what people may do or are owed, whether under law, social convention or an ethical theory. For a long time historians believed the ancient world had no such idea. Alasdair MacIntyre argued that no Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic word correctly translated as a right before roughly 1400, and Benjamin Constant held that the ancients lacked any concept of individual rights. More recent scholarship disputes both claims.
One old quarrel sets natural rights, belonging to everyone by virtue of human nature or divine command and impossible to remove, against legal rights created by particular societies, such as a citizen's vote. Jeremy Bentham thought only legal rights were real and dismissed natural ones. Thomas Aquinas took the reverse position, calling rights backed by human statute but not grounded in natural law a mere pretence.
A further distinction separates positive rights, which permit action or entitle someone to receive something, from negative rights, which permit inaction or guarantee being left alone. Americans may vote and may also decline to; Australians have the first right but not the second, because voting there is compulsory. Negative rights are often stressed by libertarians who see them chiefly as protection against interference.
Rights can belong to individuals or, some argue, to groups treated as entities in their own right, such as nations claiming self-determination. The two can collide. In a closed shop a union alone sets wages, so a worker wanting more cannot bargain separately. Economists of the Austrian School insist only individuals think and act, and Ayn Rand held that only individuals have rights. Which behaviours count as rights at all remains a live political question, with emphasis shifting between left and right.
Source: Rights
