Talk:Rights

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Rights vs. privileges

Our privilege article says that privileges are types of rights, then goes on to say rights are distinct from privileges and explains why. Our article on rights turns around and says privileges can also be rights. Identity politics makes this even more convoluted.

A right is an entitlement granted (aspirationally) to all people, whereas a privilege is an entitlement granted to a restricted class or group of people. That seems to be the best distinction I can come up with. Can anyone set me straight, or should I go ahead and change our articles? Blue (pester) 08:34, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

That's about right. One other detail that is often, but not always, true is that privileges are often not conferred by the law, but by standards of society. So while two demographics might live under the same technical law, the ones that is favored by the culture and society (the one more associated with success, has less images of inferiority, more oppertunities) is more privileged than the one that is not. You can see this in the united states, but other examples can be more dramatic: different social classes in India may live under the same law, but there are places where the upper class does not even pick up their trash because it is automatically expected someone of lower caste will do it for them. This isn't always true, as I said above: when people make laws against certain demographics, they inherently make it easier for more 'desired' or 'normative' members of their society to do everything, where people who fall under the law's restriction are out of luck. ±KnightOfTL;DR^{just shut up already} 11:20, 6 August 2012 (UTC)