Business Ethics - Moral Rights

Rights and duties
The concept of a right plays a crucial role in many of the moral arguments and moral claims invoked in business discussions.
 employees argue that they have a right to equal pay for equal work;
 managers assert that unions violate their right to manage;
 nvestors complain that taxation violates their property rights;
 consumers claim that they have a right to know.

In 1948, the United Nations adopted a „Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, which claimed that „all human beings” are entitled, among other things, to:
 the right to own property alone as well as in association with others
 the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work, and to protection against unemployment
 the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for [the worker] and his family an existence worthy of human dignity
 the right to form and to join unions
 the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holydays with pay
The concept of a right and the correlative notion of duty lie at the heart of much of our moral discourse.
The concept of a right
In general, a right is an individual’s entitlement to something: a) to act in a certain way; b) to have others act in a certain way toward him or her.
We should make an important distinction between:
1. Legal rights: The entitlement to something derive from a legal system that permits or empowers the person to act in a specified way or that requires others to act in certain ways toward that person; legal rights are limited to the particular jurisdiction within which the legal system is in force.
2. Moral rights: Entitlements derive from a system of moral standards independently of any particular legal system; such moral or human rights are based on moral norms and principles that specify that all human beings are permitted or empowered to do something or are entitled to have something done for them.