RT Article
T1 Are There Any Conflicts of Rights?
JF Ethical theory and moral practice
VO 18
IS 4
SP 677
OP 690
A1 Preda, Adina
LA English
PB Springer Science + Business Media B. V
YR 2015
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1565699211
AB This paper argues that a putative conflict between negative rights (to non-interference) and positive rights (to socio-economics goods) is not a genuine conflict. The thought that they might conflict presupposes, I argue, that the two rights are valid. This is the first assumption of my argument. The second is that general rights impose duties on everyone, not just the party who faces a conflict of correlative duties. These two assumptions yield the conclusion that positive rights impose enforceable duties on the holder of the negative right; no right is thus infringed if this duty is enforced so no conflict occurs. If this is correct, it means that we can include welfare or socio-economic rights in a set of general rights without generating conflicts with negative rights to non-interference; this might clear some space for arguments that favour egalitarian redistribution although it does not show that general positive rights do exist.
K1 Conflicts of rights
K1 Enforceable duties
K1 Non-interference
K1 positive rights
K1 Redistribution
DO 10.1007/s10677-015-9596-2