The Concept of Rights

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.