| richardhutnik said: * Abortion. You have the rights of a woman to her body and to decide whether to be a parent, the rights of a man to be a father if he got her pregnant, and also you can factor in the said rights of the unborn. Of course, you can end up denying rights to one of the parties here and think you work around, but you end up missing nuances by only thinking in terms of rights. * War. Innocent civilians do die, individuals who had nothing directly to do with a possible conflict, but who are part of a nation and contribute to the events in the war by their own personal actions by being part of the nation. Like, the individuals who voted for the Nazi party and Hitler coming into power. * The teaching of evolution in school vs parental rights. Parents are to have rights over their children, but children are to have rights to correct information. * Individual's rights to access goods and services in markets vs the rights of shopowners to serve who they want. There are cases of racists collective belief systems that had African-Americans denied access to stores to be able to buy items they needed, or operate under the same set of rules as everyone else. * An entire issue of community rights to social conventions people operate under vs the rights of individuals to do as they please. Included in this is public property rights and access. Take the example of Occupy. They decide they want to use a park for camping as a civil rights protest, to make a point about Wall Street corruption and income inequality as part of first amendment rights. You then face the fact the parks were not designed for such use, and the community opposed them being in there. * Smoker rights vs the rights of non-smokers. Smokers argue they have a right to do what they want with their body. Non-smokers argue they have a right to clean air. * Property values of home owners being reduced by what their neighbors do. In the case of a person buying property somewhere, and say the property next to it becomes a place that sells drugs or engages in prostitution, can result in one person's rights being violated at the risk of what someone else does.
Pretty much anything that isn't simply resolved comes about when you have rights in conflict. When everything is merely framed in context of rights, there is a lack of yielding or seeing a larger collective good picture. In short, you can't build an optimal ethical structure on rights alone or even one based mainly on rights. |
There are relatively few cases where rights are genuinely pitted against one another, unless you get into the highly problematic business of handing out positive rights. Most of the cases you mentioned aren't conflicts of rights, but of desires. They're mostly clear cut. So long as parents are legally responsible for their children, they can decide what their children are exposed to. When OWS is monopolizing a privately owned park that is opened to the general public, they can be forcibly removed. When a place of business decides to cater to or not cater to a certain group of people, that's entirely between them and their customers - laws compelling or forbidding them to do otherwise be damned.
Some cases are much thornier, though. The abortion example, for instance. As it stands, the woman is considered to have the full rights to terminate the fetus. The father has no say in the matter. But the second she squirts the thing out, the father is suddenly on the hook for child support. That doesn't really seem fair, but then again, neither do most of the alternatives.
The case in point is certainly not one of those cases, though. A woman has a right to obtain contraception from any willing provider. The Catholic church is not willing, yet they are being coerced into doing so anyway. So it's pretty clear whose rights are being violated.
