Summaries of The Introduction to Rights: Ch. 3

Summaries of The Introduction to Rights


Ch. 3: Mischievous Nonsense

Jeremy Bentham:

Roughly speaking, Bentham thought nature rights were mischievous nonsense. This does not mean Bentham saw rights as nothing but as an idea of effectiveness. Without the context of law, the idea of natural rights are nonsense. So the rights concepts of Bentham can be understood as two parts: 1. his negative critique of the idea of natural rights and 2. the positive account of legal rights.
As the word “negative” means, Bentham's critique of natural rights were complete. He thought that claims of natural rights are desirable innovations, and a state of wishing or demand is not a right – want is not supply. This critique was based on his thought of rights, that rights and advantageous of society are coextensive. Without advantages of society, rights are not existed. Following his concept of benefits of society, he thought that people do not have anti-legal rights to pursue freedom and property, which would lead to a state of anarchy and war.
Secondly, Bentham thought legal rights as fictions, which were meaningful as they were related with real entities, such as person, command and prohibition. When these entities are engaged in a situation, like an act is allowed or prohibited by a law, legal duties are generated and legal rights as well. The situation of the entities should be beneficial to society than it will be formed as a law, so legal duties are actually based on the benefits of society. In this way, Bentham's theory of legal rights is called a benefit theory and it describes that any legal duty that benefits me gives me a right, but it may be a barren right when an official enforce me not to do it with a more beneficial duty.