Negative and Positive Rights

Date written: 2/21/2023

Question: Explain the difference between positive and negative rights, using at least one example.

Negative and positive rights are often easy to confuse. But there is an important difference between the two. In this case, positive and negative do not have there usual meaning of good and bad. A negative right doesn’t require anything from other people other than that they don’t interfere with you. A positive right requires other people to bestow certain benefits to you.

A couple examples of negative rights are the rights to life, liberty, and property. The first right only requires that other people don’t kill or harm you. The second right requires that people don’t force you to do things. Finally the third right simply requires that people don’t steal your property. As you can see, these rights only requires that other people don’t do something to you.

An extreme example of a positive right would be the right to a Ferrari. This right would require other people to work to supply you with a Ferrari. This is obviously only a hypothetical example, but you can see that a positive right requires other people to do something for you. A more realistic example of a positive right would be the modern belief that there is a right to health-care. This right to health-care requires other people to work for you to provide you with a benefit, so it’s a positive right.

The Clash of Positive and Negative Rights

As the right to health care is a positive right it requires people to do things. It requires medical personnel to give up some of their time to provide the service. It also requires that many other people pay for the service. Most people aren’t going to want to sacrifice their time or money to millions of total strangers who demand health-care. So in order to get them to do this the use of force (i.e. violence) must be involved.

This is where the conflict comes into play. For people to get there positive right of health-care they must infringe on many other people’s negative rights to liberty and property. This happens when medical personnel are forced to work, which infringes on their right to liberty. And many other people are forced to give up their money, which is their property, so their right to property is infringed upon. This conflict happens with basically all positive and negative rights.

To get a better idea of how this works let’s consider a thought experiment. Imagine there are 2 people on a deserted island. It would be easy for them to enact their negative rights of life, liberty, and property. They simply must not kill each other, steal from each other, or force the other to do something. But now these 2 people try to enforce their positive right to health care. They will basically try to enslave one another. They will be barking orders at each other demanding that they get their health care. It simply wouldn’t work. Not to mention, that they would be infringing upon each others negative rights.

In conclusion, there is a very big difference between negative and positive rights. Negative rights only require people not to do something. Positive rights require other people to supply you with certain benefits. And in most cases these positive and negative rights contradict each other.