In Rights in Conflicts by Jeremy Waldron, I found his concern on the conflicts of rights, to be agreeable. Simply that in our “moral thinking” rights conflict with one another. He grants that if rights do conflict with one another then how should it be resolved? Of course, he’s correct to claim that in order to answer the question we have to remember that it depends on how we conceive of rights. Waldron claims to argue that if we grant Joseph Raz’s “Interest Theory” than the conflict of rights in question is inevitable; thus, we should think of rights generating a multiplicity of duties; but alas, this multiplicity of duties sort of blocks the way of approaching a resolution that rights conflict with one another. In other words, the multiplicity, so to speak, holds back any objective thing we would want to say about how we approach it.
To reach at an agreement on the conception of rights is hard because many different theorist and philosophers differ on “what rights we have” and on “what is being said when we are told that someone has a right to something” (503). For example, Robert Nozick asserts that rights are side constraints, the sort of limitation that is essentially negative in character e.g. we have to refrain from harming each other. Those rights are agent-relative; basically I have to take concern of my own constraints. I have to take care of my own conduct, and not be concerned with other persons conducts. Thus, for Nozick, side constraints and refraining are the only rights we have. Waldron argues that although with Nozick’s view we don’t have serious conflictions in rights, nevertheless, we have a serious limitation problem of what sort of moral issues we might want to bring into his framework.
As for Raz, his conception of rights, is to say that “when A is said to have a right to free speech, part of what is claimed is that her interest is speaking out freely is sufficiently important in itself from a moral point of view to justify holding other people, particularly the government, to have duties not to place her under any restrictions or penalties in this regard” (504). Raz is alluding to the idea that opposes the utilitarian in such a way that the individual is important—that rights are based on duties contrary to that of basing rights on a general utility, a quantitative measurement. Raz’s theory is for the good of an individual and for the utilitarian, for the good of the collective via calculation.
In a nutshell, Raz’s theory has a sort of subjective quality to it. When it comes to figuring out the moral importance of rights in terms of its grounding its duties in the interest etc., inevitably an interest is being singled-out. However unlike the other conception of rights, Raz’s theory, Waldron agrees (and I agree) deals more with morality in real world situations. Nozick’s theory is somewhat rigid and seemingly unrealistic, and the utilitarian is quantitative and not qualitative. I don’t want to commit to the latter mentioned. The resolution to the conflicts in rights will never suffice—whatever that conflict may be. Thus, in my view, Waldron is aware of this such that the quasi-resolution is to figure what is the relevant importance of interest in terms of weeding out the bad to the ‘good’ to the ‘better’ to the ‘best’ possible right that justifies that duty and not that other duty.