Conventional wisdom has come to hold the notion of a person's rights virtually within the same breath as his interests - that a person's rights and his interests are one and the same. The rights of a person, which are enshrined within the spirit of the negative liberties accorded to him or her by the state, have come to symbolize the essence of the modern liberal democracies. This, indeed, represents much progress for a concept once derided by Bentham as 'nonsense on stilts'. In this essay, I will argue that a person's rights and his interests are not always necessarily synonymous. Rather, I would like to argue for a conception of rights as devices employed to grant special consideration and protection to certain interests that are deemed vital to the functioning of human rights. There will therefore be interests that will not be protected by rights. Moreover, there are circumstances when rights may infringe upon a person's interests. I will begin with a discussion of the present conception of rights, followed by an analysis of the classical objections to theories of rights and how these apply to our current situation.

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Legal rights are relatively uncontroversial. Bentham wrote 'rights, the substantiate right, is the child of law; from real laws come real rights'. Legal rights are whatever the positive laws of a polity acknowledge its citizens to possess. Since the existence or non existence of such rights are easily verifiable, and any disputes settled in a court of law, they are rather uncontroversial. It is the class of fundamental rights, which are termed variously as moral rights, natural rights or human rights which are of greater interest. Natural rights (in contrast to artificial or man-made rights), as in the Lockean tradition, are derived from natural law, which is in turn based on God. Men have a duty towards God of self-preservation, and hence have rights against other men. Under this view, the main purpose of government is the upholding of natural rights by transcribing them into legal rights, but such rights are not lost even if the law fails to capture then due to oversight or incompetence. This suggests that citizens can have rights, which are beyond the law, not captured in the statutes governing the state. Human and moral rights (as referred to above) are variations of such a theme, and include all those interests of human beings, which are regarded as important to their well-being. Waldron recognizes several 'generations' of rights. He terms 'first generation rights' such concerns as free speech, freedom of association, liberty in personal affairs, and personal security, while 'second generation rights' include rights to social security, leisure, education and so on, ideas which gain support as economies develop. Such rights express the importance of individual interests in relation to ideas of community and collectivity.

It is important to note here a distinction between the 'strong' sense of right and the 'weak' sense of right, the former of which is most referred to in this essay. As Dworkin points out, when we speak of the strong sense of right, in that someone has a right (here right is used as a noun or a verb) to do something, we mean that it is morally wrong to interfere with his exercise of that particular action. Or at the very least, extraordinary circumstances must be present to justify any such interference. An example would be someone wishing to spend all his money gambling - he has a right to do so if he so wishes. When we speak of the weak sense of right, in that it is the right (here right is used as an adjective or an adverb) thing to do, we mean that such an action is the correct choice for the person given his circumstances. It does not, however, mean that there exists a moral injunction against someone trying to thwart the exercise. The weak reading does not imply that it is wrong to stop the person, merely that he is under no obligation not to exercise his right. An example would be a captured soldier trying to escape - he is right to do so but his guards are equally right to try and stop him.

Burke was a contemporary of Bentham who took an equally stern view of rights-based theories. He viewed the concept of rights as a 'metaphysical abstraction', which, 'for the sake of intellectual clarity or verbal precision ... lay aside all the 'infinite modifications' of time and circumstance which determine the practicability of a proposal' (Waldron). If anything, rights merely provided a cloak for democracy (or rule by the raving masses), and the spectre of majoritarian tyranny which followed just around the corner. Whatever their intention, rights were nonsense, and very 'dangerous nonsense' (Bentham) at that.

It is also possible to recognise at this point, a distinction between society (and the state, which represents the collective will, and the collective expression of power, by society) and the individual. The only real expression of right, it must be reiterated, is contained within the recognition accorded to such, by other individuals, and ultimately, by the state (which may be interpreted to

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