Human rights help needed :(

Can anyone define will-rights and interest-rights for me?
I've looked everywhere and just can't seem to understand it!

The Will Theory and the Interest Theory

There are two main theories of the function of rights: the will theory and the interest theory. Each claims to capture our ordinary understanding of what rights do for those who hold them. Which theory offers the better account has been the subject of spirited dispute, literally for ages.

Will theorists maintain that a right makes the right holder "a small scale sovereign". More specifically, a will theorist asserts that the function of a right is to give its holder power over another's duty. You are the "sovereign" of your computer, in that you may allow others to touch it or not at your discretion. Your property molecule in the figure above is a right because it contains a power to waive others' duty not to touch your computer. Similarly a promisee has a right because he has the power to waive the promiser's duty to keep the promise. In Hohfeldian terms, will theorists assert that every right includes a Hohfeldian power over a claim. In colloquial terms, will theorists believe that all rights confer the ability to control whether others must or must not act in particular ways.

Interest theorists disagree. Interest theorists maintain that the function of a right is to further the right-holder's interests. An owner has a right, according to the interest theory, not because owners have choices, but because the ownership makes the owner better off. To take another example, according to the interest theory a promisee has a right because promisees have some interest in the performance of the promise. Rights, the interest theorist says, are the Hohfeldian incidents you have that are good for you.

The contest between will-based and interest-based theories of the function of rights has been waged for hundreds of years. Influential will theorists include Kant, Savigny, Hart, Kelsen, Wellman, and Steiner. Important interest theorists include Bentham, Ihering, Austin, Lyons, MacCormick, Raz, and Kramer. Each theory has its advantages and drawbacks as an account of what rights do for right-holders.

The will theory captures the powerful link between rights and normative control. To have a right is to have the ability to determine what others may and may not do, and so to exercise authority over a certain domain of affairs. The resonant connection between rights and freedom (of a certain sort) is for will theorists a matter of definition.

However, the will theorist's account of the function of rights leaves him unable to account for many rights that most think there are. Within the will theory there can be no such thing as an unwaivable right: a right over which its holder has no power. Yet intuitively it would appear that unwaivable rights are some of the most important rights that we have: consider, for example, the unwaivable right not to be enslaved. Moreover, since the will theorist holds that all rights confer sovereignty, he cannot acknowledge rights in beings incapable of exercising sovereignty. Within the will theory it is impossible for "incompetents" like infants, animals, and comatose adults to have rights. Yet we ordinarily would not doubt that these incompetents can have rights, for example the right not to be tortured.

The interest theory is more capacious than the will theory. It can accept as rights both unwaivable rights (the possession of which may be good for their holders) and the rights of incompetents (who have interests that rights can protect). The interest theory also taps into the deeply plausible connection between holding rights and being better off.

However, the interest theory is also misaligned with an ordinary understanding of rights. We appear to accept that people can have interests in x without having a right to x; and contrariwise that people can have a right to x without having interests sufficient to explain this. In the first category are "third party beneficiaries." You may have a powerful interest in the lottery paying out for your spouse's winning ticket, but you have no right that the lottery pays out to your spouse. In the second category are many of the rights of office-holders and role-bearers. Whatever interest a judge may have in exercising her legal right to sentence a convict to life in prison, the judge's interests cannot possibly justify such a dramatic change in the convict's normative situation.

Over the centuries, will theorists and interest theorists have developed their positions with increasing technical sophistication. The issues that divide the two camps are clearly defined, and the debates between them are often intense. Which account of the functions of rights is correct,or whether we ought to think that rights have some single function at all, is one of the major unresolved issues in the theory of rights.