COMPETING CONCEPTIONS OF RIGHTS
Questions like these are complicated by the lack of any consensus about
the proper conception of rights. Not only do philosophers differ about
what rights we have, they differ also on what is being said when we are
told that someone has a right to something.
These disagreements have a direct bearing on our question about
moral conflicts. Consider the conception of rights put forward by Robert
Nozick. According to Nozick, rights are to be thought of as side
constraints-limits on the actions that are morally available to any agent.
They are essentially negative in character, requiring each agent to refrain
from performing actions of the specified type: they never require anything
other than an omission.