Thank you for this piece! I had never thought about this positive/negative distinction, and it's important. If I understand you correctly, the bad people who roughed up the man helped by the Good Samaritan -- those bad people presumably violated their victim's rights, but the poor man couldn't claim it was his right to be helped by whoever passed by.

For what it's worth, I'm not sure there are "natural rights" largely because natural rights resist definition -- I feel more comfortable sourcing rights in the social contract -- "don't beat me up" because it's there in the social contract, versus a more conceptual argument about what rights are inherent in members of humankind.