744 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
who are not human beings. This curious result arises of the meaning which the law attaches to the word person. For the purposes of law a person is defined as an entity, human or nonhuman, in whom the law recognized a capacity for acquiring rights and bearing duties. A slave is not a person in the eye of the law although he is a human being. An idol is a person in the eye of the law although an idol is an inanimate object. The reason for this difference will be obvious. A slave is not a person although he is a human being, because the law does not regard him as an entity endowed with the capacity for rights and duties. Concisely an idol is a person though not a human being because the law doeswhether wisely or not is another question-recognize the capacity for rights and duties. To be recognized as a person is of course a very important fact fraught with tremendous consequences. Whether one is entitled to rights and liberties upon this issue, the rights which flow from this recognition as person are not only as life but are as vital as life. They include right over material things, their acquisition, their enjoyment and their disposal— called right to property. There are others far more important than these rights over material things. Firstly, there is the right in respect of one’s own person—a right not to be killed, maimed or injured without due process of law called a right to life, a right not to be imprisoned save in due process of law-called right to liberty. Secondly, there is a right to reputation-a right not to be ridiculed or lowered in the estimation of fellow men, the right to his good name i.e. the right to the respect so far as it is well founded which others feel for him shall not be diminished. Thirdly, there is the right to the free exercise of powers and liberties [l] .
1 There is a distinction between Rights. Powers and Liberties which perhaps need to be explained especially in a treatise intended for the common man. When it is vain that a person has a right it means that it is a duty on some other person either to make the right real by fulfilling his duty or not to injure that right by a wrong doing or non-doing.
There is a distinction between right and liberty which is some times lost by using the word right in a wider sense so as to include liberty. For instance ibis said that a person has a right i.e. he is at liberty to do as he pleases with his own ; but this omits to take into account that a person has no right and he is not at liberty to interfere with the liberty of another. The distinction between right and liberty may be stated thus ; Rights of person are concerned with things which other persons “ought” to do for him. Liberties of a person are concerned with things he ‘may’ do for himself.
Liberties are acts which a person may do without being restrained by the law. The sphere of a person’s legal liberty is that sphere of activity within which the law is content to leave him alone.