These abstract, third generation rights don't mean anything, and countries such as Cuba and China use them to praise each other and to avoid criticism.
Yet it would be wrong to assert that these and other first-generation rights correspond completely to the idea of "negative" as opposed to "positive" rights.
The suggestion that first-generation rights are more feasible than other generations because they stress the absence over the presence of government is somehow transformed into a prerequisite of a comprehensive definition of human rights, such that aspirational claims to entitlement are deemed not to be rights at all.
Conversely, second- and third-generation defenders often look upon first-generation rights, at least as commonly practiced, as insufficiently attentive to material especially "basic"—human needs and, indeed, as being instruments in service to unjust social orders, hence constituting a "bourgeois illusion".
Accordingly, if they do not place first-generation rights outside their definition of human rights, these partisans tend to assign such rights a low status and to treat them as long-term goals that will come to pass only after the imperatives of economic and social development have been met, to be realized gradually and fully achieved only sometime vaguely in the future.
Second-generation rights are, fundamentally, claims to social equality.
First-generation proponents, for example, are inclined to exclude second- and third-generation rights from their definition of human rights altogether or, at best, to regard them as "derivative".
Nevertheless, most of the second-generation rights do necessitate state intervention, because they subsume demands more for material than for intangible goods according to some criterion of distributive justice.
On the other hand, as the social inequities created by unregulated national and transnational capitalism become more and more evident over time and are not directly accounted for by explanations based on gender or race, it is probable that the demand for second-generation rights will grow and mature, and in some instances even lead to violence.
There is some overlap with the first-generation rights, such as that of religious liberty, but rights of cultural membership are broader and more controversial.
However, Cranston fails to recognize that such first-generation rights as due process and the right to vote also require substantial government action and the investment of considerable public resources.
