What Are Civil Rights? (And Who Gets Them?)

Imagine you’re playing a pickup basketball game at school. Someone makes up a rule—only kids wearing blue shirts can shoot from outside the key. The kids in red shirts get angry. That’s unfair, they say. But the kid who made the rule just shrugs. “Those are the rules.”

Now imagine the rule isn’t about shirt colors. It’s about skin color. And it’s not a basketball game—it’s the law. For a very long time in the United States, that’s exactly how things worked. If you were Black, there were things you simply couldn’t do: live in certain neighborhoods, go to certain schools, eat at certain lunch counters, vote in elections. Not because of anything you’d done. Because of who you were.

This is where civil rights come in. But what are civil rights, exactly? That turns out to be a surprisingly hard question.

A Strange Thing About a Famous Phrase

Here’s something odd: for a phrase that has changed the world, nobody can agree on what “civil rights” actually means. There’s no official definition in any major law. The people who wrote the most important civil rights laws apparently assumed everyone already understood what they meant—but they were wrong. Different people at different times have meant very different things by the same two words.

Philosophers and lawyers have spent a lot of energy trying to sort this out. What they’ve found is that the meaning of “civil rights” has changed dramatically over time, and it’s still changing today. There are basically three big ideas about what civil rights are, each one arising from a different moment in history. And each one leads to a different answer to the question: what does equality really require?

First Idea: The Right to Have the Same Laws

The first major understanding of civil rights came right after the American Civil War, in the 1860s. Slavery had just ended. But the former Confederate states quickly passed what were called “Black Codes”—laws that made it clear that formerly enslaved people were not going to be treated as full citizens.

Here’s what these codes did: they said Black people couldn’t own property, couldn’t make contracts that would be enforced by courts, couldn’t sue someone who hurt them, couldn’t give testimony in court. If a white person stole from a Black person, or beat them up, or cheated them in a business deal, the Black person had no legal way to fight back. Meanwhile, white vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan were attacking Black communities with almost no police protection.

The US Congress responded with the Civil Rights Act of 1866. This law said something remarkable: all citizens, regardless of race or “previous condition of servitude” (meaning whether they’d been enslaved), were entitled to the same basic legal rights as white citizens. These included:

The right to make and enforce contracts
The right to own, buy, and sell property
The right to sue in court and give testimony
The right to “the full and equal benefit of all laws” meant to protect your person and property

Notice what this law is not doing. It’s not creating brand-new rights. It’s saying: the legal rights that white people already have must be extended to everybody. The core idea is equal protection of the law. The problem these lawmakers saw wasn’t that the laws were bad—it was that the laws weren’t being applied to everyone.

This might sound obvious today. But at the time, it was radical. And it didn’t last.

The Supreme Court quickly struck down the parts of the law that let the federal government enforce these rights. The Court said it was up to the states, not the federal government, to protect people’s basic legal rights. And the states—especially in the South—had no interest in doing that for Black citizens. So the first big idea about civil rights—that everyone has a right to the equal protection of the law—was essentially abandoned.

One philosopher who influenced this early thinking was Thomas Paine (the same guy who wrote Common Sense during the American Revolution). Paine argued that “civil rights” are different from “natural rights.” Natural rights are things you have just because you’re human—like the right to think for yourself. Civil rights are things you need because you live in a society with other people—like the right to have contracts enforced. You can’t protect those rights on your own; you need the law to do it. And if you’re excluded from that protection, you’re not really a full member of society.

Second Idea: The Right Not to Be Discriminated Against

The second big understanding of civil rights is the one most people in the United States know today. It emerged from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s—the marches, the sit-ins, the speeches, the violence protesters faced, and the laws that eventually passed.

This understanding says: civil rights are rights against discrimination. They protect you from being treated differently—in jobs, housing, schools, voting, public places—because of your race, sex, religion, ethnicity, age, or disability.

The key laws here are the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which banned discrimination in employment and public accommodations), the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (which protected the right to vote), and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (which banned discrimination in housing). These laws didn’t just say “treat everyone equally under existing law.” They created new rights: the right not to be fired because of your race, the right not to be denied a mortgage because of your sex, the right not to be turned away from a restaurant because of your skin color.

This is the antidiscrimination principle, and it’s been incredibly powerful. It ended legal apartheid in the United States. It transformed workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods. For many people today, this is what civil rights means.

But it’s also controversial—and not just from the obvious direction (people who think discrimination should be legal). Philosophers and legal scholars have raised serious questions about whether the antidiscrimination principle is enough.

What’s Wrong with Just Banning Discrimination?

First, the libertarian critique. Some economists and legal scholars argue that discrimination isn’t actually a problem the government needs to solve. Their reasoning: if an employer refuses to hire qualified Black workers because of racism, that employer is making a bad business decision—they’re passing up talented employees. In a free market, they argue, racist employers will eventually be driven out of business by non-racist competitors who hire the best people regardless of race. So discrimination will disappear naturally, without government interference.

Most people find this argument unconvincing—history shows that discrimination didn’t disappear on its own—but it reveals something interesting: the antidiscrimination principle assumes that markets and private choices need to be regulated, and not everyone agrees.

Second, the critical race critique. This is more complicated, and comes from scholars who actually support civil rights but think the antidiscrimination principle doesn’t go far enough. Their argument: focusing on individual acts of discrimination hides the bigger problem.

Here’s an analogy. Imagine a race where some runners start with heavy weights strapped to their ankles. Halfway through the race, you remove the weights. Now everyone is running under the same rules. The runners who had the weights are still way behind, but you say: “Well, now everyone’s being treated equally.” The problem is that you’ve ignored the whole first half of the race.

Similarly, critics argue that focusing on whether someone is currently discriminating against you ignores centuries of slavery, segregation, and exclusion that have left Black Americans with far less wealth, worse health, worse schools, and fewer opportunities—even when no individual is actively discriminating against them today. The antidiscrimination principle, they say, makes it seem like any remaining inequality is fair, when it actually isn’t.

Third, the feminist critique. Some feminist legal scholars argue that the antidiscrimination principle assumes men and women are “the same” and should be treated the same. But this backfires when women and men actually are different in ways that matter. For example: pregnancy. If you treat pregnant workers exactly the same as non-pregnant workers, you’re not helping them—you’re ignoring a real biological difference. Some scholars argue that what women really need isn’t “equal treatment” but rather laws that address the specific harms women face, like sexual violence and unequal distribution of childcare.

Fourth, the intersectionality critique. This one comes from legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. She pointed out that traditional antidiscrimination law treats race discrimination and sex discrimination as separate categories. But what about a Black woman who experiences a form of discrimination that’s different from what white women face and different from what Black men face? Under existing law, she might not have a case. She’s not being discriminated against “as a woman” (because white women aren’t treated this way) and not “as a Black person” (because Black men aren’t treated this way). Her harm falls through the cracks.

Third Idea: The Right to a Life That Can Flourish

The third understanding of civil rights is still emerging. It’s the most recent and the most ambitious. And it might be the most important for thinking about what civil rights should mean today.

Here’s the basic idea: civil rights are rights to the things you need in order to have a real chance at a flourishing life. Not just to be free from discrimination. Not just to have equal protection under existing laws. But to actually have the conditions that make a good life possible.

Think about what that might include. Do you have a civil right to:

A clean environment, free from pollution that makes you sick?
Health care, so you don’t die from a treatable illness?
A good education, not just one that teaches you the basics?
Safety from gun violence in your school and neighborhood?
Support for your family if a parent needs to stay home to care for you or a grandparent?

There aren’t laws that guarantee these things—not yet, anyway. But activists and some philosophers argue that there should be. And they argue that these are civil rights, not just nice things to have.

This is different from the first two understandings. The first idea said: “We have these laws; everyone should get the benefit of them.” The second idea said: “No one should be treated worse because of who they are.” This third idea says: “The law should actively create the conditions for everyone to have a good life.”

Notice that this doesn’t fit neatly into either of the earlier frameworks. It’s not about “equal protection” of existing law (because the law doesn’t exist yet). And it’s not about “non-discrimination” (because even if nobody discriminates, you might still not have health care or a clean environment).

This third understanding is sometimes called a welfarist view of civil rights, because it focuses on people’s welfare or well-being. It’s also connected to what philosophers call “human flourishing”—the idea that a good life isn’t just about avoiding harm, but about having the opportunity to develop your abilities, pursue meaningful goals, and live well.

Which One Is Right?

Here’s the honest answer: nobody knows. Philosophers still argue about this. Each of the three understandings captures something important, and each has problems.

The equal protection idea from the 1860s seems almost naive today—it assumed that existing laws were basically fine, and the only problem was that they weren’t applied equally. But existing laws can be unjust too.

The antidiscrimination idea from the 1960s has been enormously powerful, but critics argue it’s too narrow. It can’t address deep structural inequalities. And it can even be used against the groups it was meant to help—for example, when courts use “colorblindness” to strike down affirmative action programs designed to remedy past discrimination.

The flourishing idea is ambitious and inspiring, but it raises hard questions. Who decides what a “flourishing life” requires? Does the government have the resources—and the right—to guarantee everyone a good education, health care, a clean environment? And if civil rights include all of these things, does the term become so broad that it loses its meaning?

These questions aren’t just academic. They shape real laws and court cases. They determine whether someone who’s been treated unfairly has any legal recourse. They determine what kind of society we’re trying to build.

What’s At Stake

Part of what makes civil rights so hard to define is that they’re about something deeply contested: what equality actually means. Is equality just about treating everyone the same under the law? Or does it require something more—like making sure everyone has roughly the same chances in life? Or does it require something different entirely, like ensuring that everyone can flourish, even if that means different people need different things?

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who has written extensively about human flourishing, argues that a just society should guarantee its citizens the ability to do certain things: to live a full human life, to use their senses and imagination, to play, to have meaningful relationships, to have control over their environment. These are capabilities, not just rights on paper.

Whether you agree with her or not, the underlying question is hard to escape: What does it mean to really treat people as equals? And what rights do we need to make that happen?

There’s no final answer. But the debate itself matters. Because every time someone says “that’s a civil rights issue,” they’re making a claim about what equality demands and what we owe each other as members of the same society. And those claims shape the world we live in.

A Final Puzzle

Here’s something to think about. The phrase “civil rights” originally referred to rights you had because you were a citizen—rights that distinguished citizens from slaves, and from people (like women and children) who were under someone else’s authority. It was about who counted as a full member of society.

That’s still what civil rights are about, in a way. The question “what are civil rights?” is really the question “who counts as a full member of society, and what does that membership require?” Every generation has to answer that question for itself. And the answer keeps changing.

Appendices

Key Terms

Term	What It Does in This Debate
Civil rights	Legal rights that aim to create equality for groups that have been excluded, subordinated, or treated unjustly
Equal protection	The idea that everyone is entitled to the same protections under existing law
Antidiscrimination principle	The idea that civil rights protect individuals from being treated worse because of their membership in a group (like race or sex)
Anti-subordination principle	The idea that civil rights should aim to end the systemic domination of one group by another, not just ban individual acts of discrimination
Intersectionality	The idea that discrimination can happen at the intersection of multiple identities (like being both Black and a woman) in ways that aren’t captured by looking at each identity separately
Human flourishing	The idea that a good life involves developing your abilities and having real opportunities to live well
Welfarist principle	The idea that civil rights should guarantee the conditions people need to have a decent life

Key People

Thomas Paine — A revolutionary-era writer who argued that “civil rights” are different from “natural rights”: they’re rights you need because you live in society, and they require law to protect them.
Kimberlé Crenshaw — A legal scholar who developed the concept of intersectionality to show how antidiscrimination law can miss harms that affect people at the intersection of multiple identities.
Martha Nussbaum — A philosopher who argues that a just society should guarantee its citizens the “capabilities” they need to flourish, not just formal legal equality.
Catherine MacKinnon — A feminist legal scholar who argues that the antidiscrimination principle is too narrow and that women’s subordination is rooted in sexual violence and control, not just unequal treatment at work.

Things to Think About

The three understandings of civil rights described here come from different historical moments—the 1860s, the 1960s, and today. Do you think one of them is more right than the others? Or could they all be right in different ways?
The “flourishing” view of civil rights says we should have rights to things like health care, education, and a clean environment. But if civil rights include everything that helps people live well, is the term becoming too broad to be useful? Should there be limits on what counts as a civil right?
The anti-subordination critique argues that banning individual acts of discrimination isn’t enough because it ignores deeper structural inequalities. Do you agree? If someone has never personally discriminated against anyone, can they still benefit from a system that’s unfair?
Intersectionality suggests that people can experience discrimination in unique ways that don’t fit into neat categories. Can you think of a situation where someone might be treated unfairly in a way that’s not covered by existing anti-discrimination laws? What would it take to fix that?

Where This Shows Up

Affirmative action debates — The disagreement over whether colleges should consider race in admissions turns on whether civil rights require “colorblindness” or active remediation of past inequality.
Environmental justice — Communities of color are disproportionately affected by pollution and climate change. Activists argue this is a civil rights issue, not just an environmental one.
LGBTQ+ rights — Debates about whether discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity should be illegal under civil rights law are ongoing in many countries.
School dress codes and discipline — Policies that punish certain hairstyles or suspend students at different rates for the same behavior raise questions about whether civil rights protections extend to schools.