ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with three topics: types of rights, the development of the terminology of rights, and the question of the primacy of welfare rights. Option rights correspond to spheres of individual sovereignty, as it were, in which the individual is morally free to act on the basis of his own choices. Possession of an option right, furthermore, implies some kind of rightful control over the actions of others. The notion of option rights, as an explicitly recognized concept, was inherited by the natural rights theorists from the definition of "rights" given in the late middle ages and the Renaissance. The broad notion of welfare rights, in fact, is represented in an older tradition in the development of definitions of "rights". It could be argued that there is a personal duty to promote the personal good of another if it is a geniune good, so that the need for the language of rights is obviated.
