The standing dispute in rights theory turns on what the right to life is *for*. The negative-rights tradition reads rights as side constraints on what others may do: protections of non-interference that do not generate positive duties of provision on anyone else's productive labor. Locke's *Two Treatises* (Locke, John, (1689) 1988) sets the template: the right to life is the right not to be killed and the right that the person, and what the person has mixed labor with, not be taken; the political community's office is to secure these against trespass, not to provision the conditions under which a life can be sustained. Nozick's *Anarchy, State, and Utopia* (Robert Nozick, 1974) presses the Lockean inheritance through to its fullest modern formulation: rights are side constraints that cannot be overridden for aggregate gain, and the move from negative civil rights to positive welfare rights is a category mistake. Hayek's *The Constitution of Liberty* (Hayek, Friedrich A., 1960) presses the deeper analytic objection: a right requires a specifiable duty-bearer, 'society' is not a duty-bearer of the right shape, and positive welfare claims therefore cannot be articulated as rights without analytic confusion. Berlin's negative-liberty distinction (Berlin, Isaiah, 1958) and the legal positivism running through twentieth-century American constitutional doctrine inherit this register.

The participation-conditions tradition reads rights as articulating the conditions under which agency-bearing subjects can keep participating in the political community. Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights (Roosevelt, Franklin D., 1944) names adequate wages, housing, medical care, and education as rights without which civil rights are hollow. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 25 (United Nations General Assembly, 1948), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (United Nations General Assembly, 1966) institutionalize the same commitment at international scale. T. H. Marshall's *Citizenship and Social Class* (Marshall, T. H., 1950) distinguishes civil, political, and social rights as historical articulations of one citizenship-commitment. Henry Shue's *Basic Rights* (Shue, Henry, 1980) presses the structural argument: subsistence rights are basic in the strict logical sense; without subsistence secured, no other rights can be exercised, so subsistence-rights are presupposed by the rights they enable, and the right to life that does not entail subsistence is the right that cannot be exercised by anyone whose life is not subsisting. The capabilities tradition (Sen, Amartya, 1992); (Sen, Amartya, 1999); (Nussbaum, Martha C., 2000); (Nussbaum, Martha C., 2006) reaches the same destination through welfare-economics: formal possession of rights without substantive capability to convert rights into functioning lives leaves the rights-bearer where rights were meant to prevent her from being. The republican-citizenship tradition (Pettit, Philip, 1997) reaches it through non-domination: rights articulate the conditions under which subjects are not subject to arbitrary power over the conditions of their lives.

The dispute the section frames is whether the participation-conditions reading expands the right to life into something it is not (a question pressed by Nozick and Hayek) or whether it articulates what the right to life already required once the *life* term is read at the depth where life actually subsists, a thesis pressed by Roosevelt through Shue. The structural-necessity derivation that adjudicates the dispute is supplied at [§9.1.2](<9.1.2 What is Required.md>), which shows that the political community is the specifiable duty-bearer Hayek's analysis requires. *Thus the question stands disputed.*


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← [9.1 Rights](<9.1 Rights.md>) | [9.1.2 What is Required](<9.1.2 What is Required.md>) →
