The Enabling Model of Rights

1993 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lesley Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
State Action ◽  
Wrong Thing ◽  
State Welfare ◽  
The Right

The belief that state welfare programmes are justified because they enable many people to do what they could not otherwise have done is attractive. This article examines the claim that this belief flows logically from a particular account of what it means to have a right to do something. This enabling model of rights holds that rights can be violated in two ways: by interfering with people doing something they have a right to do and depriving the right-holders of the resources actually needed to do what they have a right to do. Having certain rights to do things can justify state action designed to provide people with the resources that enable them to do what they could not otherwise have done. However attractive this model of rights might be, it is unable to accommodate the possibility that an individual can have the right to do something which is the morally wrong thing to do.

When the State Speaks, What Should It Say?

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey Brettschneider
Keyword(s):  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
The State ◽  
Hate Groups ◽  
New Approach ◽  
State Action ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Theory Of Value ◽  
The Right ◽  
Equal Citizenship ◽  
The Ideal

How should a liberal democracy respond to hate groups and others that oppose the ideal of free and equal citizenship? The democratic state faces the hard choice of either protecting the rights of hate groups and allowing their views to spread, or banning their views and violating citizens' rights to freedoms of expression, association, and religion. Avoiding the familiar yet problematic responses to these issues, this book proposes a new approach called value democracy. The theory of value democracy argues that the state should protect the right to express illiberal beliefs, but the state should also engage in democratic persuasion when it speaks through its various expressive capacities: publicly criticizing, and giving reasons to reject, hate-based or other discriminatory viewpoints. Distinguishing between two kinds of state action—expressive and coercive—the book contends that public criticism of viewpoints advocating discrimination based on race, gender, or sexual orientation should be pursued through the state's expressive capacities as speaker, educator, and spender. When the state uses its expressive capacities to promote the values of free and equal citizenship, it engages in democratic persuasion. By using democratic persuasion, the state can both respect rights and counter hateful or discriminatory viewpoints. The book extends this analysis from freedom of expression to the freedoms of religion and association, and shows that value democracy can uphold the protection of these freedoms while promoting equality for all citizens.

From Property Rights to Liberty Rights: We the Corporations, A Review Essay

2021 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-340
Author(s):  
Laura Phillips Sawyer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
State Action ◽  
Unequal Treatment ◽  
The People ◽  
The Right ◽  
We The People

A long-standing, and deeply controversial, question in constitutional law is whether or not the Constitution's protections for “persons” and “people” extend to corporations. Law professor Adam Winkler's We the Corporations chronicles the most important legal battles launched by corporations to “win their constitutional rights,” by which he means both civil rights against discriminatory state action and civil liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution (p. xvii). Today, we think of the former as the right to be free from unequal treatment, often protected by statutory laws, and the latter as liberties that affect the ability to live one's life fully, such as the freedom of religion, speech, or association. The vim in Winkler's argument is that the court blurred this distinction when it applied liberty rights to nonprofit corporations and then, through a series of twentieth-century rulings, corporations were able to advance greater claims to liberty rights. Ultimately, those liberty rights have been employed to strike down significant bipartisan regulations, such as campaign finance laws, which were intended to advance democratic participation in the political process. At its core, this book asks, to what extent do “we the people” rule corporations and to what extent do they rule us?

scholarly journals «The Right Thing» and «The Wrong Thing» as a Result of Discerning Signals

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-173
Author(s):  
Tatiana Muzychuk ◽  
Igor Anokhov
Keyword(s):  
External Noise ◽  
Wrong Thing ◽  
Physical Level ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right

The article is dedicated to studying the process of information perception by an individual. A hypothesis is suggested that the environment that surrounds an individual is full of different signals, which have na­tural, social or technogenic origin. Separate signals can turn into information, if the recipient is able of discerning these signals and perceives them on the physical, intellectual, emotional and axiological levels of information perception. Whereas the complex of signals which are indiscernible for an individual are external noise. The authors state that interpretation of a signal by individuals begins on the physical level of perception which is necessary to synchronize their activity with that of the source of the signal. After that the individual has to move to the axiological level of information perception in order to coordinate the notions and meanings with the source of the signal. Furthermore, the authors substantiate the possibility of revealing two components in the structure of the discerned signal: «The Right Thing» and «The Wrong Thing» as an inherent beginning of any process of perceiving the outside world by an individual. The suggested hypothesis is illustrated in the article by the example of two kinds of information message: a painting by A. Deyneka and a poem by A. Blok which are studied in terms of the proposed hypothesis about the existence of levels of information perception and the possibility of discerning two basic elements in them: «The Right Thing» and «The Wrong Thing». The results of the research can be applied to improve the process of communicating and perceiving information.

State civil disobedience: A republican perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danny Michelsen
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
State Action ◽  
The Status ◽  
Right To Participation ◽  
Legitimate State ◽  
The Right ◽  
International Trade Laws

The article deals with the question of whether or under which circumstances it is reasonable to interpret some forms of illegal state action as civil disobedience and whether republican political theory can make a difference to the justification of those actions. It is argued that the theory of freedom as non-domination and the interpretation of the right to participation as the “right of rights” in a legitimate state provide a better justificatory scheme for cases in which developing or emerging countries break international trade laws for the purpose of protecting constitutional rights than Rawls’ theory of civil disobedience, because it takes the problem of power asymmetries in international relations and the status of social rights more seriously. However, these republican standards do not offer different practical solutions for a specific type of state disobedience, humanitarian intervention, because transferring the standards of non-domination and the fundamental right to participation to international relations would lead to a “maximalist” interpretation of human rights, which would undermine the function of such interventions as an instrument of last resort against oppressive governments.

Part V Rights and Freedoms, B Rights and Freedoms under the Charter, Ch.37 Section 7: The Right to Life, Liberty, and Security of the Person

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Young Margot
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
First Century ◽  
Canadian Society ◽  
Right To Life ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
State Action ◽  
Private Action ◽  
Positive Rights ◽  
The Right ◽  
Progressive Potential

Section 7 jurisprudence shows strong application of the rights to life, liberty, and security of the person to a range of state action and actors. However, courts have significantly limited the progressive potential of these rights through two doctrinal concerns: the negative/positive rights distinction and causation issues. The result is a bounded jurisprudence reflecting both the strengths and weakness of liberal legalism. In particular, claims targeting the twenty-first century crises of Canadian society—social and economic inequality, as well as environmental degradation—while meaningfully apiece with the values of life, liberty, and security of the person, are unlikely to succeed under section 7 without critical and pointed judicial movement beyond liberalism’s divide between public and private action.

The Right to Dominate: How Old Ideas About Sovereignty Pose New Challenges for World Order

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-489
Author(s):  
Roland Paris
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
State Action ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
The Right ◽  
Domestic Affairs ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractA principal theme of international relations scholarship following the Cold War was the apparent erosion of state sovereignty caused by globalization's integrative effects and the proliferation of international institutions and networks. In recent years, however, scholars have noted a reverse trend: the reassertion of traditional, or Westphalian, state sovereignty. By contrast, I highlight another recent trend that has gone largely overlooked: the reaffirmation of older “extralegal” and “organic” versions of sovereignty by three of the world's most powerful states—Russia, China, and the United States. After tracing the genealogy of these older concepts, I consider how and why they have gained prominence in the official discourse of all three countries. I also explore the implications of this shift, which not only illustrates the importance of “norm retrieval” in international affairs, but also raises questions about the foundations of international order. Contrary to Westphalian sovereignty, which emphasizes the legal equality of states and the principle of noninterference in domestic affairs, the extralegal and organic versions offer few constraints on state action. If anything, they appear to license powerful states to dominate others.

scholarly journals Mexico and the tobacco industry: doing the wrong thing for the right reason?

BMJ ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 332 (7537) ◽  
pp. 353-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Samet ◽  
Heather Wipfli ◽  
Rogelio Perez-Padilla ◽  
Derek Yach
Keyword(s):  
Tobacco Industry ◽  
Wrong Thing ◽  
Right Reason ◽  
The Right

22. Character, circumstances, and the causes of crime: towards an analytical criminology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Per-Olof H. Wikström
Keyword(s):  
Action Theory ◽  
Wrong Thing ◽  
Situational Action Theory ◽  
Common Problems ◽  
Future Direction ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Causes Of Crime ◽  
The Right ◽  
Crime Causation

This chapter analyses and explains acts of crimes as moral actions (i.e., actions guided by what is the right or wrong thing to do) within an analytical criminology framework. It outlines some common problems of current mainstream criminological theorizing and research, such as the lack of a shared definition of crime, the poor integration of knowledge about the role of people and places in crime causation, the frequent confusion of causes and correlates, and the lack of an adequate action theory, and proposes a more analytical criminology as the remedy. The chapter introduces Situational Action Theory (SAT), a general, dynamic, and mechanism-based theory about crime and its causes, designed to address these problems and provide a foundation for an analytical criminology. It concludes by briefly discussing main implications for the future direction of policy and prevention.

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