What are Rights?

Many people fight for their rights. Workers fight for decent wage. Residents fight for good safe clean environment-friendly neighbourhood. Schoolchildren fight for education. Tenants fight for fair tenancy deals. Patients fight for rights to health care. Victims fight for the rights to justice. bla. bla.

What are rights anyway? Who give rights? Who take away rights?

Legal right is a right given by law, which imposes a legal duty on other to abstain from intefering with it or to provide it. For example, if I marry my wife, no one else can take away my rights to live together with her, and my in-laws must allow my wife to move out from her previous home to live together with me.

Moral right is a right not necessarily enforced by law, but deemed important to human interest, that should be met by others. For example, a right to stay alive, a right for healthcare, a right for education

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If I have a right to health and I am not healthy, then I do not have my rights fulfilled. The health system is legally and morally guilty for not ensuring, providing and sustaining my health.

But if supposedly, one day I walk down the street and accidentally tripped down and sprained my leg, I suffer from ill health. Who is responsible then? Clearly no one.

When I die one day, and that's a grave shortfall of health - has mortality (or even God) has infriged my right to health and life? Who am I to demand life when I certainly do not own my own life?

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Conclusion

Healthcare legal rights, or any rights at all is not absolute. It may be granted by the law, the government or the society. Even moral rights like gender equality, freedom of religion or speech, are socially relative.

But ultimately rights and privileges of important human interest such as the right to live, the right to health is God-given and God-sanctioned. The Bible says "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own Greek poets have said, For we are also His offspring."

We do not deserve it, but it is given out of God's sovereign will and grace. Let us then appreciate them, and when situation arises, give up our rights for others.

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." -- Christ