Really tangled paragraph The conception of a right to something that implicitly creates an obligation on someone else to provide that thing a positive right is widely challenged You can not enforce your wish for something under the auspices of a right if it implicitly constitutes an obligation on another to do something for you However one person s right to something creates a negative right in that you have the right for that thing not be interfered with by another and that other is obligated not to interfere with your right to it The obligation test is widely used to determine what constitutes a right To illustrate You have the right to own an axe but you do not have a right to an axe If you do own an axe others have an obligation not to steal it I ve got a post graduate education and I had to read practically every sentence of this paragraph more than once to parse it And it has a lot of problems beyond that Normally we avoid second person I don t see why it is needed here widely challenged with no citation I have almost never seen this challenged except by liberatarians I m pretty confident that most people for example consider that the right to life extends to the point of creating an obligation for a government or society to attempt to rescue victims of a natural disaster I would doubt that there is a widely held belief that a person dying of thirst while someone next to him had abundant water could be reasonably expected to die respecting his neighbor s property rights By the second sentence this has switched to imperative or more precisely hortatory mode which is entirely inappropriate It becomes a statement of a narrowly libertarian conception of rights in the article s narrative voice Again widely used without citation I can not name a country where this in general has the force of law Certainly not the U S one of the more libertarian countries in the industrialized world but one which recognizes a right to a publicly financed primary and secondary education In short poorly written libertarian ca nt I ll allow at least 48 hours and probably more for someone to rewrite this in a way that belongs here but if it hasn t been substantially fixed by then I intend simply to remove it Talk