Even for Utilitarians, this duality serves as a line in the sand. Some considerations will clearly fall on one side or the other: assuring humans are not tortured is an obvious negative morality concern, while assuring humans have access to affordable sushi is probably a positive morality concern.

Some considerations are hard to categorize: is access to a job a human right? Perhaps only if a job is the only way to access other human rights (i.e. pay for food, shelter, etc). Is access to leisure time a human right? There are many questions of this sort.

These questions are hard for all types of ethical thinking, and thus this heuristic is an option for ways to communicate about these more nebulous issues.

The heuristic is essentially: Is this a human right? Everyone who is concerned with moral decision making must have some sort of response to that question.

For pure “util-driven” Utilitarians, it’s possible to claim there are no metaphysical rights, only degrees of better or worse (which I am actually pretty convinced is a true idea), thus making this distinction meaningless. But they must still respond to a question of cost, and this duality really only emphasizes that all moral considerations can fall into two buckets based on higher cost (negative morality) or lower cost (positive morality).