In short, legal rights are the privileges granted to citizens by their governments. Therefore, these freedoms/rights are created and enforced by the legal system of governments, which also means that they can also be redefined or modified by the same parties. Similarly, these are not universal, but they vary from state to state and country to country, person to person, even from time to time. Law, rights, human rights, legal rights, moral rights For a more in-depth discussion of property in a philosophical context, see Honore 1960, 1961; Becker, 1977; Waldron, 1988; Munzer, 1990; Campbell, 1992; Harris, 1996; and Penner, 1997. (Some of them are more concerned with the moral justification of ownership.) First, should rights be analyzed only in terms of duties to others (with another condition), or should we also include other concepts such as permission, power, and immunity? Hohfeld believed that, strictly speaking, something was a legal claim only if it was consistent with an obligation to others, but he argued that the use of the law was often confusing because the reference really referred to one of the other terms. Thus, the law also sometimes said that X had a right if (1) he had A`s permission, (2) he had A`s legal authority, (3) Y had no legal authority to influence him. Remember what makes a claim a moral right: If there is a moral justification for a claim, then that person has a moral right. From this definition, we see that for a person to have a moral right, all that is needed is that the person`s claim is morally justified. Rights that can be removed are said to be alienable. For example, you can give up ownership of a car by selling it. This possibility shows that, unlike the right to liberty, a right to property is alienable. In addition, the general right of ownership, which prohibits the taking of possession of property without compensation, may be lost if the property was acquired through illegal activities.
If a person not only has the right to do something, but is also morally obligated to do so because of a role assumed or an agreement, we say that the person has an ethical obligation or duty as well as a right to do the thing in question. An ethical duty or obligation is a moral requirement to follow a certain action, that is, to do or refrain from doing certain things. For example, many technical codes of ethics provide that engineers have a moral right to deal with misconduct issues outside their organization, but they are also required to do so when public health and safety are at stake. On the other hand, it is quite possible to talk coherently about ownership in a way that does not necessarily correspond to the legal situation. For example, a parent may tell a young child that a certain toy belongs to them, even if it legally belongs to the parent. Similarly, it may be plausible to argue that the concepts of property and possession, even if less solidly protected, may exist in societies that have nothing that we normally recognize as a legal system in its own right. Some may take such examples as an indication that the notion of ownership is not essentially legal, while others tend to think that they are merely metaphorical extensions of a concept that is legally based. Section 14.1 of Canada`s Copyright Act protects moral rights. [14] Moral rights cannot be assigned but revoked by contract. Many publishing contracts in Canada now include a standard waiver of moral rights.
Unlike absolute rights, rights whose claims can be balanced by moral considerations are called prima facie rights – from the Latin “at first sight”. Most rights are prima facie. For example, the right to travel freely, the right to own property, the right to drive, the right to be served afterwards (if you`ve been standing in line) are all rights that can rightly be overridden in certain circumstances. Of course, circumstances that might give rise to a kind of prima facie right may be common to a kind of prima facie right, but may be rare in others. To say that a right is prima facie and not absolute means that there may be other considerations that outweigh the right in a particular case.