Articles – Correct Usage: ‘A Right’ or ‘The Right’?

articles

I found lots of examples of both in dictionaries but cannot see any regularity.

Usually choice of an article depends on whether I mean a specific object or a class of objects.

But what exactly is meant when it comes to "right"? Is it ability to do something or a specific case when I do it?

For example, in the sentence:

I have _____ right to vote, because I'm 18.

what should I use?

There is the cite on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

A right to life, a right to choose; a right to vote, to work, to strike; a right to one phone call, to dissolve parliament, to operate a forklift, to asylum, to equal treatment before the law, to feel proud of what one has done; a right to exist, to sentence an offender to death, to launch a nuclear first strike, to carry a concealed weapon, to a distinct genetic identity; a right to believe one's own eyes, to pronounce the couple husband and wife, to be left alone, to go to hell in one's own way.

All these "rights" are used with "a".

The first result of the search of "right examples" in Google reads:

Some examples of human rights include:

The right to life.
The right to liberty and freedom.
The right to the pursuit of happiness.
The right to live your life free of discrimination.
The right to control what happens to your own body and to make medical decisions for yourself.

How can that be explained?

Best Answer

Either option would be correct and sound just fine.

I have a right to vote because I’m 18.

I have the right to vote because I’m 18.

Sometimes the definite article is assuredly the correct one to use, and sometimes the indefinite article is the correct one to use, but other times the difference is so insignificant that it doesn’t really matter which one you use.

Additional context might tilt the circumstances one way or the other, but, in this case, either one of those is acceptable and they pretty much mean the same thing.

Put another way, if someone is standing in line at the polls, and they say:

I have a right to vote in this election!

or:

I have the right to vote in this election!

no one is going to correct their grammar because they used the wrong article – no matter which version was uttered by the prospective voter.

This would hold true for other rights as well:

We all have a right to pursue happiness.

We all have the right to pursue happiness.

When we say the latter, we are referring to a specific right. When we say the former, we implicitly acknowledge that we are not talking about our only right. But no one will hear the latter and assume it implies we have no other rights.

You can even switch them around in the excerpts in your question with no adverse effects:

The right to life, the right to choose; the right to vote, to work, to strike; the right to one phone call...

Some examples of human rights include:
    A right to life.
    A right to liberty and freedom.
    A right to the pursuit of happiness.

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