Rights

I think we need a clear and coherent and principled dialog on the term "right." I am so sick of people inventiong rights here and there. Whatever they want is turned into a "right" and that's not, well, right. Rights are not a right because you desire something. All rights arise out of duty and when was the last time you heard someone demanding a right acknowledge that they had any kind of a duty related to that right? Not often, I'd wager. I'd like to find a really clear exposition of the idea of rights. I googled around some and what I found was more incoherent and a much larger variety of inconsistent ideas than I expected. I suppose that just points up the need for a clear exposition.

The first point is that rights only apply to man. The reason for that is that a right is a moral concept and only man is a moral actor. Animals only have rights because human beings have duties which extend to animals. I'll have to dig around to see if I can find good, sound material to use to explain what I mean. Most of the rights I hear about are not rights at all but desires disguised as rights.