> Many people (especially, but not only libertarians) don’t regard positive rights as true human rights. They may be human 'goods' but they are not human 'right

> Many people (especially, but not only libertarians) don’t regard positive rights as true human rights. They may be human 'goods' but they are not human 'rights' People can "regard" anything as anything, but why should anyone else care what they "regard"? > Personally I think human rights are largely a legal fiction anyway — they are invented, not natural Some schools of jurisprudence – e.g. legal positivism, legal realism – view law as fundamentally disconnected from ethics: either ethics is subjective, or even if it is somehow objective, it is a separate sphere with no inherent legal relevance. That seems to align with your claim that human rights law is "invented, not natural"–but, what then makes it a "legal fiction"? We speak of corporate personhood as a "legal fiction" because we are taking a term "person" and stretching it far beyond its non-legal meaning; I don't think "human rights", even under a positivist/realist reading, involves any such stretching. Conversely, other schools – e.g. natural law theory – presuppose the existence of objective ethics, and view law's fundamental purpose as to serve ethics (even if inevitably imperfectly). From that perspective, humans have ethical rights and duties, natural law rights and duties; and human rights law, as a field of positive law, should be judged on the basis of how well it conforms to natural law. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights That is an example of a terribly written Wikipedia article. It speaks of "positive rights" being "initially proposed in 1979 by the Czech jurist Karel Vašák", but then goes on to quote 19th century philosopher Frédéric Bastiat discussing them. As usual, Stanford has a much better article – https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative... – which says that the "The idea of distinguishing between a negative and a positive sense of the term ‘liberty’ goes back at least to Kant..." – although leaving open the question of whether "positive vs negative liberty" and "positive vs negative rights" are synonymous or distinct.