Rights-based ethical theories hold that individuals possess moral rights—claims against others that cannot be overridden merely because doing so would produce better aggregate outcomes. The tradition traces from natural rights theory (Locke's rights to life, liberty, and property grounded in natural law) through the modern human rights framework (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) to contemporary philosophical accounts. Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia articulates rights as side-constraints: boundaries on action that agents must respect regardless of consequences, rather than goals to be maximized. Rights-based ethics faces the challenge of grounding rights (in nature, reason, dignity, or convention), resolving conflicts between rights, and determining the scope of rights-holders—questions that connect directly to debates about personhood, animal rights, and the rights of future generations.
Read Locke's Second Treatise (chapters on property and the state of nature) and the opening chapters of Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Then consider a case where respecting an individual's rights conflicts with maximizing welfare—such as forced organ redistribution—and articulate why a rights theorist finds this impermissible even when a utilitarian might not.
From your study of deontological ethics, you know that some actions are intrinsically right or wrong regardless of their consequences—that there are moral constraints on what we may do to people, not merely goals to optimize. Rights-based ethics gives this structure its most concrete institutional form. A right is a claim an individual holds against others: a right to life means others are forbidden from killing you, a right to liberty means others cannot enslave you, and a right to property means others cannot take what is yours without consent. What makes these claims specifically *rights* rather than just morally important interests is that they are not simply one consideration to weigh against others—they function as moral side-constraints that must be respected even when overriding them would produce better aggregate outcomes.
The classic grounding for natural rights comes from John Locke. In the state of nature—before civil government—Locke argued that individuals are governed by natural law, which grants each person inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property (understood as the product of one's labor). These rights don't come from government; government is legitimate only insofar as it protects them. This locates rights in human nature and rationality, making them pre-political and universal. The modern human rights framework (articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) inherits this structure, even when it jettisons the theological grounding—it treats basic rights as belonging to persons simply in virtue of their humanity.
Robert Nozick sharpened the philosophical core in *Anarchy, State, and Utopia* (1974). His key move is the notion of rights as side-constraints: rather than viewing rights as values to be maximized (a utilitarian might say "minimize rights violations"), Nozick holds that rights define the boundaries within which action must occur. You cannot violate one person's rights to prevent five others' rights from being violated—the arithmetic doesn't apply. This explains why rights-theorists find forced organ redistribution monstrous even when it would maximize lives saved: it treats one person's body as a resource available for others' benefit, violating the constraint that each person's rights must be respected. The individual's separateness—the fact that she is not merely a vessel for aggregate welfare—is precisely what rights protect.
The central challenges for rights-based ethics are grounding and conflict resolution. Grounding: why do people have the rights Locke or Nozick attribute to them? If the answer is natural law, it requires a metaphysics many find hard to defend. If it's human dignity, what grounds *that*? Contemporary theorists like Alan Gewirth have attempted to derive rights from the necessary presuppositions of agency itself. Conflict resolution: what happens when one person's right to life conflicts with another's? When does a right of self-defense override the aggressor's right not to be harmed? Rights theories must provide principled answers here, and the machinery of threshold deontology (rights can be overridden only when the stakes are catastrophically high) is one influential response. These tensions push rights theorists toward increasingly precise theories of what rights are, who holds them, and when they yield.
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