rights

Here is how I defined rights at BlackCrayon.com:

OBLIGATIONS (Rights & Responsibilities)

Obligation: Something that a moral agent ought or ought not to do.

1. Positive obligations are those things you are obliged to pursue.
2. Negative obligations are those things you are obliged to avoid.

Responsibilities: The obligations you have to others in the world.

1. Positive responsibilities are those things you are normatively required to do for others.
2. Negative responsibilities are those things that you are proscribed from doing to others.

Rights: The responsibilities that the rest of the world has to you.

1. Positive rights are those things the world owes you.
   (Examples of claimed positive rights include: the right to employment; the right to healthcare; the right to an education.)
2. Negative rights are those things that all others must avoid doing to you.
   (Examples of claimed negative rights include: freedom of speech; right to privacy; right to self-defense.)

And here's what I've decided to add today:

RIGHTS

We shall be speaking throughout this work of "rights," in particular the rights of individuals to property in their persons and in material objects. But how do we define "rights"? "Right" has cogently and trenchantly been defined by Professor Sadowsky:

When we say that one has the right to do certain things we mean this and only this, that it would be immoral for another, alone or in combination, to stop him from doing this by the use of physical force or the threat thereof. We do not mean that any use a man makes of his property within the limits set forth is necessarily a moral use.[53]

Sadowsky's definition highlights the crucial distinction we shall make throughout this work between a man's right and the morality or immorality of his exercise of that right. We will contend that it is a man's right to do whatever he wishes with his person; it is his right not to be molested or interfered with by violence from exercising that right. But what may be the moral or immoral ways of exercising that right is a question of personal ethics rather than of political philosophy -- which is concerned solely with matters of right, and of the proper or improper exercise of physical violence in human relations. The importance of this crucial distinction cannot be overemphasized. Or, as Elisha Hurlbut concisely put it: "The exercise of a faculty [by an individual] is its only use. The manner of its exercise is one thing; that involves a question of morals. The right to its exercise is another thing."[54]

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[53] James A. Sadowsky, S.J., "Private Property and Collective Ownership," in Tibor Machan, ed., The Libertarian Alternative (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1974), pp. 120-21.

[54] Hurlbut, cited in Wright, American Interpretations, pp. 257 ff.

Murray N. Rothbard,
The Ethics of Liberty,
"Natural Law and Natural Rights"