Rights as Entitlements and Rights as Claims

Abstract

There are at least two different accounts on the meaning of “rights”. According to one of them, rights are relations between two terms: someone and a good; to the other, rights are relations between three terms: an individual, some person and an action or something. They are different, but they are not altogether incompatible. Following the rights as entitlements interpretation, rights are moral or legal entitlements, that is, moral or legal relations of persons to goods (of benefits granted to persons by a human law, moral or legal). As a kind of rights, human rights are seen as entitlements of persons or individuals to essential goods, of which it can be inferred claims against other persons or against governments and officials. Human rights talks are generally made in this way. But following the other, rights in a proper sense have to be interpreted as claims. In this paper, I’ll intend to present some arguments favoring the advantage of disclosing all the meaningful entitlement’s statements into explicit claim’s ones.