Negative rights refer to the absence of laws that prevent an action, such as the negative right to walk through the park. You decide whether you have the right to walk through the park by asking if there are any laws to prevent you from doing so. Positive rights refer to laws that give you the liberty to perform an action, such as the right to drive a car. You decide whether you can drive a car by asking yourself if a law stipulates that you must have special permission in order to drive a car, and then by asking yourself if you have that permission.
John Stuart Mill, in 1859, developed his harm principle. Mill described the ideal government as one that gives everyone the right to do anything, so long as it does not restrict the rights of others. You make ethical decisions based on the harm principle by asking yourself how your decisions will impact other people's lives. In organizational development, you can use the harm principle to write the laws and rules for others to live by. Evaluate each rule, and determine if its real purpose is the defense of someone's rights. Your ultimate goal is to give rights, with only reasonable and necessary restrictions.
John Rawls, in 1971, developed his original position principle. For Rawls, you should develop every system of laws or rules before you create your organization. This is his original position. His idea was centered around a veil of ignorance, a position where you know nothing about who you will be in the society and create laws or rules for that society. If you know nothing about who you will be in the organization, you will work to ensure fairness for everyone, to make sure that you will be treated fairly. In personal decision making, original position is an approach to moral decisions that asks you to forget your stake in any decision and evaluate both sides from a purely neutral point of view.
The social contract theories are systems of rights-based social framework, from which you make decisions about how a country or organization will be run. Thomas Hobbes, in 1651, developed his social contract that stipulated that each person gives up some natural, or negative, rights in order to have more important natural rights protected by the government. These protected natural rights would become the standard by which the government would be judged effective by the people. They would also serve as the guiding moral agent for the government's decisions.