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Rights: United States
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There are two major contemporary philosophical approaches to explaining which fundamental rights of conduct there are, and why these rights should be respected. These two approaches are broadly identifiable as deontological and consequentialist. Status theories hold that human beings have attributes that make it fitting to ascribe certain rights to them, and make respect for these rights appropriate. Instrumental theories hold that respect for particular rights is a means for bringing about some optimal distribution of interests. Each approach has characteristic strengths and weaknesses, and the long-running contest between them is ongoing.
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Given this dichotomy between full protection of property rights and public purpose limits on those rights, the limits on governmental interference with those rights have never been totally clear or without debate. Over time, the meaning of property itself has been transformed. (A parcel of land is still a parcel of land, but how does one look at items like stock options or brand name protection or computer software enhancements?) Thus, the courts are called upon as they always have been throughout American history to interpret the meaning of the different constitutional concepts regarding property. At times, the judiciary has been a champion of property rights, and its decisions have been hailed as necessary to safeguard economic liberty, foster competition, and protect the private enterprise system. Critics of the courts have attacked these same decisions as a barrier to much-needed reforms aimed at protecting the weak, and have criticized them for undermining the emerging welfare state.
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The most common objection to grounding rights in such a theory is that the resulting rights will be too flimsy. If rights are justified only insofar as they generate good consequences, it may seem that the theory will need to prune its rights, perhaps severely, whenever maximum utility lies elsewhere. Why should it not be a rule of such a system, for example, that one should frame an innocent man if this would prevent a major riot? Why should it not be a rule that one should "violate" the right of an innocent not to be killed if this would prevent the killings of two innocents elsewhere? While status-based rights can appear to be too strong, instrumental rights can appear to be too weak.
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Libertarianism has focused on the preservation of individual and corporate rights through constraints on government power, while not necessarily favoring "traditional" values. Some on the right, especially outside of the United States and Canada, reject the rights-based assumptions of this philosophy. Conversely some, but by no means all, libertarians do not consider themselves to be right wing and reject the traditional one-dimensional political spectrum, preferring to think in terms of liberty vs. authority rather than socialism vs. capitalism.
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