The nature of rights—whether moral, legal, natural, or otherwise—has
a way of leaving everyone confused. On one thing, however, people seem
to agree: rights have a unitary nature. If a right is an ideal, a
statement of what ought to be, then the way in which it is actually
implemented is irrelevant to its definition. If, on the other hand, a
right is understood in more positivist terms as ―nothing but a
prediction of how certain institutions will react if a particular
person acts in a particular way,1 then the manner in which we talk
about a right is only relevant to the extent that our words correlate
with our deeds.
The reason there is so much confusion over
rights is because everyone seems to misunderstand their fundamental
composition. Just as human beings have two essential aspects, a
physical body and an incorporeal soul, rights exist in two dimensions
simultaneously, not one. The way we talk about a right and the way we
put it into actual practice are flip sides of the same coin. It is
these twin elements of rhetoric and practice that define a right, and
neither one is ancillary to or derivative of the other.