Social rights

Within current political discourse, “rights-talk” is individualist and liberal, while “responsibility” is communitarian. As Wolterstorff points out (Justice in Love,86-7), though, the concept of “rights” is as inherently social as the concept of “responsibility”:

“To have a right to something is to stand in a certain kind of normative social relationship; sociality is built into the nature of rights. More specifically: having a right to something is always having it with respect to someone, having it against someone. In the limiting case, that ‘someone’ is oneself; one is other to oneself. But usually the other is someone other than myself. Rights are normative bonds between oneself and the other.” These are, he argues, typically not bonds forged by the will of the two parties, but “antecedent to will, binding oneself and the other together.”In short, “a right is a legitimate claim to the life-good of being treated in a certain way by the other.”

Not only does “rights-talk” assume sociality, but it implies norms in treatment of others. Rights-talk makes no sense outside some moral or legal order, in which relationship can be subject to norms.