Individual rights
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"Individual rights" are the rights of individuals by virtue of their humanness, i.e. their nature as sentient beings. Individual rights provide principles to delimit the interaction of individuals in society with respect to personal interactions and the distribution of goods and services. Individual rights are sometimes held to be distinct from human rights, because the latter class is often considered to include human goods and benefits (positive rights) rather than rights proper (negative rights.) Individual rights are an individual's moral claim to freedom of action. Such rights may be respected or recognized by others for reasons of reciprocity, contract, pragmatism, or as a moral imperitive.
Some individual rights may be forfeited if an individual does not exercise reciprocal respect and restraint. Individual rights are distinct from civil rights; civil rights are rights granted by government and individual rights are assumed prior to government. Individual rights are often codified into law so that they may be protected by impartial third parties such as the government. Governments that respect individual rights often provide for systemic controls that protect individual rights such as a system of "due process" in criminal justice. Police states are generally considered to be oppressive because they do not respect individual rights. With respect to individual rights the role of the government is as a third party protecting, identifying and enforcing the rights of the individual while attempting to assure just remedies for transgressions.
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[edit] Social Control and Individual Rights
In Western discourse, individual rights are commonly assumed to be inversely related to social control. By contrast, much of the recent political discourse on individual rights in the People's Republic of China, particularly with respect to due process rights and rule of law, has focused on how protection of individual rights actually makes social control by the government more effective. For example, it has been argued that the people are less likely to violate the law if they believe that the legal system is likely to punish them if they actually violated the law and not punish them if they did not violate the law. By contrast, if the legal system is arbitrary then an individual has no incentive to actually follow the law.
People who argue that individual rights are more important than social control are called "individual rights advocates". Advocates tend to argue for increased civil rights. This is traditionally associated with liberalism.
[edit] Role of Government
Rights are significant only where corresponding duties and responsibilities exist and people have the ability to enforce them - because society and individual survival depend on people relying on their ability to enforce rights people must be able to enforce those obligations where there is an absence or a betrayal of trust. Obligations are enforced by individuals and societal expectations and norms, but ultimately may require the ability or the actual enforcement by a government. The absence of a firm ability to enforce rights increases the risks associated with entering agreements and relying on rights, which limits individuals and societies ability to operate co-operatively.
The definition and upholding of individual rights is the core responsibility of any modern government.
In the United States, the Constitution outlines individual rights within the Bill of Rights. In Canada, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms serves the same function. One of the key differences between the two documents is that some rights in the Canadian Charter can be overridden by governments if they deliberately do so and "the resulting balance of individual rights and social rights remains appropriate to a free and democratic society" after the change. In practice, no Canadian government has ever chosen to face the political consequences of actually overriding the Charter. In contrast, in the United States, no such override exists (not even in theory, as is the case in Canada), and judicial activism has been the norm in the interpretation of the Bill of Rights.
[edit] What Rights
The idea of individual rights is closely related to the idea of individual capital in some theories of political economy, in which the individual enhances his or her own creative capacities (as opposed to measurable productive capacities, which is usually called the theory of human capital), and must remain free to do so in any way she or he sees fit. The most prominent advocate of this approach, called "development as freedom", is economist Amartya Sen. In this view, individual rights have the economic purpose of enabling each individual to optimize his or her capacity to make a unique contribution others cannot make.
More recent human development theory combines this view with a more rigorous ecological economics and means of measuring well-being. Individual rights such as "freedom from toxins" or "freedom to garden", e.g. cultivating hemp, assume a central role in most such theories, and have indeed been upheld in some countries, e.g. Canada, in which the individual is recognized as having a right to plant native plants in defiance of any social control, as part of the existing "right of free expression" and "freedom of conscience".
Some claim the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, and subsequent declarations, established individual rights, in theory, as the basis of international legal norms.
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Many thinkers dispute the validity of the distinction between negative and positive rights, which they see as being purely a matter of semantics. It can be said that any negative right involves an entitlement to protection against some form of abuse, and is therefore just as "positive" as a positive right. Others would counter that the exercise of negative rights doesn't require any action on the parts of others or the government (e.g., you could conceivably exercise free speech without anyone else acting to help you, whereas free health care cannot happen without actions from others).
