Rights, Liberty, Equality, Justice and Political Obligation
The concepts
- Rights: justified claims, often correlative with duties. Distinguish natural vs legal/positive rights, civil-political vs social-economic rights, and claim-rights vs liberties.
- Liberty: absence of arbitrary constraint (negative) versus capacity for self-realisation (positive); also republican liberty as non-domination. Know Mill's harm principle.
- Equality: formal (same treatment) vs substantive (equal outcomes or capabilities); equality of opportunity vs of result; the tension with liberty.
- Justice: distributive (who gets what), procedural, retributive, and corrective; Rawls's two principles (basic liberties; fair equality of opportunity plus the difference principle); Nozick's entitlement critique; Amartya Sen's capabilities.
- Political obligation: why obey the state? Social contract, consent, fair play, gratitude, natural duty of justice, and the anarchist and civil-disobedience challenges (Thoreau, Rawls).
Traps
Do not treat liberty and equality as inevitably opposed; substantive liberty may require some equality of resources. Do not confuse the difference principle (inequalities permitted if they benefit the least advantaged) with simple egalitarianism. Do not equate 'rights' with 'duties' - they are correlative, not identical. Do not read Rawls's veil of ignorance as a claim that people forget their identity permanently.
Rule of thumb
For any rights question ask: who bears the correlative duty, and who can enforce it? That distinguishes a moral claim from an enforceable legal right.
Worked example: A constitutional right to education imposes a duty on the state and is enforceable in courts; a moral claim to be helped by a neighbour is not, without more, a legal right.