ABSTRACT
What is a right? There are a number of distinct types of rights that will have to be distinguished if we are to make headway with our question about the right to an abortion on
demand. There are nevertheless certain generalizations that hold across the major subtypes, and we will begin by discussing them. We can think of the rights we actually have (as opposed to those that are merely proposed or that we may think we ought to have) as warrants for actions. These warrants are supplied by rules that are established in some society, group, or association. Once established the rules themselves warrant the holders (A’s) of the rights they create in taking a certain class or type of action (X) and they place other persons (B’s), who can be expected to object to A’s doing X, under various kinds of restrictions, prohibitions, or requirements in respect to A’s doing X. When A sets to do X and B comes forward to object, A can conclusively establish a kind of propriety for her doing X, and a kind of inapplicability for B’s objection, by producing the constitutional provision, statute, court decision, feature of the moral code, and so forth that constitutes the warrant for her claimed right to do X. Such warrants hold against-that is, serve to defeat-a more or less clearly specified range of the known or anticipated objections to A’s doing X. Thus to have a right to do X in a particular jurisdiction, community, or group is to have a distinctive degree of assurance, in advance as well as during and after the fact of acting, that doing X will be held to be proper by some criterion possessed of authoritative standing in that jurisdiction or society. Doing X will be held to be correct or blameless despite the fact that members of the society vigorously object to it. Two features of this account of rights deserve further emphasis. First, when a society or group establishes a right it in effect adopts an official or collective or authoritative position concerning a more or less clearly identified class of actions and objections to that action. It commits itself, in advance of specific instances of the action qua exercises of the right (and hence in advance of knowing the consequences of particular instances of the exercise of the right), to the position that the class of actions will be permitted (and at least to that extent encouraged). The unfolding of experience may convince that this commitment is mistaken and may lead to alteration or repeal of the rule that established the right. But until such time as the rule has been changed, the action will be entitled to protection whenever proposed or taken by a holder of the right. Such commitments, moreover, are all but invariably made in the awareness that the actual exercise of the right will commonly be controversial, that there will be persons who strongly object to A’s doing X. If it could be expected that A’s doing X would be universally welcomed or at least accepted, there would be no point to establishing a right to do X. The second feature that deserves emphasis is implicit in the first. The commitment just described is in effect a commitment to accept and to protect the decisions of right holders to do X or not. With rare exceptions that are irrelevant here, to have a right to do X is to be at liberty to do X or not as one sees fit. If A decides that it will be to her advantage to do X, the fact that there is an established right to do X itself warrants her in proceeding to do it. If she chooses to reveal her reasons for doing X and others find them objectionable or even repugnant, they may think badly of her as a person and she may suffer some ill consequences as a result. But
given that she has a legal right to do X, others cannot properly hold that her doing X was, is, or would be illegal; given that she has a moral right, others cannot hold that it was, is, or would be immoral. The practice of according rights is one of the, probably the, single most dramatic respect in which societies accord autonomy of action to individual agents.
