The idea that certain rights are natural or inalienable also has a history dating back at least to the
Stoics of
late Antiquity, through
Catholic law of the early
Middle Ages, and descending through the
Protestant Reformation and the
Age of Enlightenment to today. The existence of natural rights has been asserted by different individuals on different premises, such as
a priori philosophical reasoning or religious principles. For example,
Immanuel Kant claimed to derive natural rights through reason alone. The
United States Declaration of Independence, meanwhile, is based upon the "
self-evident" truth that "all men are ... endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". Likewise, different philosophers and statespersons have designed different lists of what they believe to be natural rights; almost all include the right to life and
liberty as the two highest priorities.
H. L. A. Hart argued that if there are any rights at all, there must be the right to liberty, for all the others would depend upon this.
T. H. Green argued that "if there are such things as rights at all, then, there must be a right to life and liberty, or, to put it more properly to free life."
John Locke emphasized "life, liberty and property" as primary. However, despite Locke's influential defense of the
right of revolution,
Thomas Jefferson substituted "
pursuit of happiness" in place of "property" in the
United States Declaration of Independence.
Ancient A prevailing view in historical scholarship was that there was no conception of "rights" in the ancient world. This view was captured by
Alasdair MacIntyre, who wrote, "there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression ‘a right’ until near the close of the Middle Ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400," adding that if even such rights existed, "no one could have known that there were." Similarly,
Benjamin Constant stated, "The ancients … had no conception of individual rights." The 40 Principal Doctrines of the
Epicureans taught that "in order to obtain protection from other men, any means for attaining this end is a natural good" (PD 6). They believed in a
contractarian ethics where mortals agree to not harm or be harmed, and the rules that govern their agreements are not absolute (PD 33), but must change with circumstances (PD 37–38). The Epicurean doctrines imply that humans in their natural state enjoy personal sovereignty and that they must consent to the laws that govern them, and that this consent (and the laws) can be revisited periodically when circumstances change. The
Stoics held that no one was a slave by nature; slavery was an external condition juxtaposed to the internal freedom of the soul (
sui juris).
Seneca the Younger wrote: Of fundamental importance to the development of the idea of natural rights was the emergence of the idea of natural human equality. As the historian A.J. Carlyle notes: "There is no change in political theory so startling in its completeness as the change from the theory of Aristotle to the later philosophical view represented by
Cicero and Seneca. ... We think that this cannot be better exemplified than with regard to the theory of the equality of human nature." Charles H. McIlwain likewise observes that "the idea of the equality of men is the profoundest contribution of the Stoics to political thought" and that "its greatest influence is in the changed conception of law that in part resulted from it." Cicero argues in
De Legibus that "we are born for Justice, and that right is based, not upon opinions, but upon Nature."
Modern One of the first Western thinkers to develop the contemporary idea of natural rights was French theologian
Jean Gerson, whose 1402 treatise
De Vita Spirituali Animae is considered one of the first attempts to develop what would come to be called modern natural rights theory. The
Polish-Lithuanian union made a natural rights case at the
Council of Constance (1414–1418), led by
Paulus Vladimiri, rector of the
Jagiellonian University. He challenged legality of the
Teutonic Order's
crusade against Lithuania, arguing that the Order could only wage a defensive war if pagans violated the natural rights of the Christians. Vladimiri further stipulated that infidels had rights which had to be respected, and neither the Pope nor the
Holy Roman Emperor had the authority to violate them. Lithuanians also brought a group of Samogitian representatives to testify to atrocities committed by the Order. The Stoic doctrine that the "inner part cannot be delivered into bondage" re-emerged centuries later in the
Reformation doctrine of liberty of conscience. In 1523,
Martin Luther wrote: 17th-century English philosopher
John Locke discussed natural rights in his work, identifying them as being "life, liberty, and estate (property)", and argued that such
fundamental rights could not be surrendered in the
social contract. Preservation of the natural rights to life, liberty, and property was claimed as justification for the rebellion of the American colonies. As
George Mason stated in his draft for the
Virginia Declaration of Rights, "all men are born equally free", and hold "certain inherent natural rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity." Another 17th-century Englishman,
John Lilburne (known as
Freeborn John), who came into conflict with both the monarchy of
King Charles I and the
military dictatorship of
Oliver Cromwell, argued for level human basic rights he called "
freeborn rights" which he defined as being rights that every human being is born with, as opposed to rights bestowed by government or by human law. The distinction between alienable and unalienable rights was introduced by
Francis Hutcheson. In his
Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Hutcheson foreshadowed the Declaration of Independence, stating: "For wherever any Invasion is made upon unalienable Rights, there must arise either a perfect, or external Right to Resistance. ... Unalienable Rights are essential Limitations in all Governments." Hutcheson, however, placed clear limits on his notion of unalienable rights, declaring that "there can be no Right, or Limitation of Right, inconsistent with, or opposite to the greatest public Good." Hutcheson elaborated on this idea of unalienable rights in his
A System of Moral Philosophy (1755), based on the
Reformation principle of the liberty of conscience. One could not in fact give up the capacity for private judgment (e.g., about religious questions) regardless of any external contracts or oaths to religious or secular authorities so that right is "unalienable". Hutcheson wrote: "Thus no man can really change his sentiments, judgments, and inward affections, at the pleasure of another; nor can it tend to any good to make him profess what is contrary to his heart. The right of private judgment is therefore unalienable." In the
German Enlightenment,
Hegel gave a highly developed treatment of this inalienability argument. Like Hutcheson, Hegel based the theory of inalienable rights on the
de facto inalienability of those aspects of personhood that distinguish persons from things. A thing, like a piece of property, can in fact be transferred from one person to another. According to Hegel, the same would not apply to those aspects that make one a person: In discussion of
social contract theory, "inalienable rights" were said to be those rights that could not be surrendered by citizens to the sovereign. Such rights were thought to be
natural rights, independent of positive law. Some social contract theorists reasoned, however, that in the
natural state only the strongest could benefit from their rights. Thus, people form an implicit social contract, ceding their natural rights to the authority to protect the people from abuse, and living henceforth under the legal rights of that authority. Many historical apologies for slavery and illiberal government were based on explicit or implicit voluntary contracts to alienate any "natural rights" to freedom and
self-determination. The
de facto inalienability arguments of Hutcheson and his predecessors provided the basis for the
anti-slavery movement to argue not simply against involuntary slavery but against any explicit or implied contractual forms of slavery. Any contract that tried to legally alienate such a right would be inherently invalid. Similarly, the argument was used by the
democratic movement to argue against any explicit or implied social contracts of subjection (
pactum subjectionis) by which a people would supposedly alienate their right of self-government to a sovereign as, for example, in
Leviathan by
Thomas Hobbes. According to
Ernst Cassirer, These themes converged in the debate about American independence. While Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence, Welsh nonconformist
Richard Price sided with the colonists' claim that
King George III was "attempting to rob them of that liberty to which every member of society and all civil communities have a natural and unalienable title." Price again based the argument on the
de facto inalienability of "that principle of spontaneity or self-determination which constitutes us agents or which gives us a command over our actions, rendering them properly ours, and not effects of the operation of any foreign cause." In
Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism,
Staughton Lynd pulled together these themes and related them to the slavery debate: Meanwhile, in America,
Thomas Jefferson "took his division of rights into alienable and unalienable from Hutcheson, who made the distinction popular and important", and in the 1776
United States Declaration of Independence, famously condensed this to: In the 19th century, the
movement to abolish slavery seized this passage as a statement of constitutional principle, although the
U.S. constitution recognized and protected the
institution of slavery. As a lawyer, future
Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase argued before the Supreme Court in the case of
John Van Zandt, who had been charged with violating the
Fugitive Slave Act, that: The concept of inalienable rights was criticized by
Jeremy Bentham and
Edmund Burke as groundless. Bentham and Burke claimed that rights arise from the actions of government, or evolve from tradition, and that neither of these can provide anything
inalienable. (See Bentham's "Critique of the Doctrine of Inalienable, Natural Rights", and Burke's
Reflections on the Revolution in France). Presaging the shift in thinking in the 19th century, Bentham famously dismissed the idea of natural rights as "nonsense on stilts". By way of contrast to the views of Burke and Bentham,
Patriot scholar and justice
James Wilson criticized Burke's view as "tyranny". The signers of the Declaration of Independence deemed it a "self-evident truth" that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". In
The Social Contract,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau claims that the existence of inalienable rights is unnecessary for the existence of a constitution or a set of laws and rights. This idea of a
social contractthat rights and responsibilities are derived from a consensual contract between the government and the peopleis the most widely recognized alternative. One criticism of natural rights theory is that one cannot draw norms from facts. This objection is variously expressed as the
is-ought problem, the
naturalistic fallacy, or the
appeal to nature.
G.E. Moore, for example, said that
ethical naturalism falls prey to the naturalistic fallacy. Some defenders of natural rights theory, however, counter that the term "natural" in "natural rights" is contrasted with "artificial" rather than referring to
nature.
John Finnis, for example, contends that
natural law and natural rights are derived from self-evident principles, not from speculative principles or from facts.
Thomas Hobbes Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) included a discussion of natural rights in his moral and
political philosophy. Hobbes' conception of natural rights extended from his conception of man in a "state of nature". Thus he argued that the essential natural (human) right was "to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life; and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own judgement, and Reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto." (
Leviathan. 1, XIV) Hobbes sharply distinguished this natural "liberty", from natural "laws", described generally as "a precept, or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do, that, which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving his life; and to omit, that, by which he thinketh it may best be preserved." (
Leviathan. 1, XIV) In his natural state, according to Hobbes, man's life consisted entirely of liberties and not at all of laws – "It followeth, that in such a condition, every man has the right to every thing; even to one another's body. And therefore, as long as this natural Right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man... of living out the time, which Nature ordinarily allow men to live." (
Leviathan. 1, XIV) This would lead inevitably to a situation known as the "
war of all against all", in which human beings kill, steal and enslave others to stay alive, and due to their natural lust for "Gain", "Safety" and "Reputation". Hobbes reasoned that this world of chaos created by unlimited rights was highly undesirable, since it would cause human life to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". As such, if humans wish to live peacefully they must give up most of their natural rights and create moral obligations to establish political and
civil society. This is one of the earliest formulations of the theory of government known as the
social contract. Hobbes objected to the attempt to derive rights from "
natural law", arguing that law ("lex") and right ("jus") though often confused, signify opposites, with law referring to obligations, while rights refer to the absence of obligations. Since by our (human) nature, we seek to maximize our well being, rights are prior to law, natural or institutional, and people will not follow the laws of nature without first being subjected to a sovereign power, without which all ideas of
right and wrong are meaningless – "Therefore before the names of Just and Unjust can have place, there must be some coercive Power, to compel men equally to the performance of their Covenants..., to make good that Propriety, which by mutual contract men acquire, in recompense of the universal Right they abandon: and such power there is none before the erection of the Commonwealth." (
Leviathan. 1, XV) This marked an important departure from medieval natural law theories which gave precedence to obligations over rights.
John Locke ,
"Life, Liberty, Estate (
property)" John Locke (1632–1704) was another prominent Western philosopher who conceptualized rights as natural and inalienable. Like Hobbes, Locke believed in a natural right to life,
liberty, and
property. It was once conventional wisdom that Locke greatly influenced the
American Revolution with his writings of natural rights, but this claim has been the subject of protracted dispute in recent decades. For example, the historian Ray Forrest Harvey declared that Jefferson and Locke were at "two opposite poles" in their political philosophy, as evidenced by Jefferson's use in the Declaration of Independence of the phrase "pursuit of happiness" instead of "property". More recently, the eminent legal historian John Phillip Reid has deplored contemporary scholars' "misplaced emphasis on John Locke", arguing that American revolutionary leaders saw Locke as a
commentator on established constitutional principles.
Thomas Pangle has defended Locke's influence on the Founding, claiming that historians who argue to the contrary either misrepresent the classical republican alternative to which they say the revolutionary leaders adhered, do not understand Locke, or point to someone else who was decisively influenced by Locke. This position has also been sustained by
Michael Zuckert. According to Locke, there are three natural rights: • Life: everyone is entitled to live. • Liberty: everyone is entitled to do anything they want to so long as it does not conflict with the first right. • Estate: everyone is entitled to own all they create or gain through gift or trade so long as it does not conflict with the first two rights. In developing his concept of natural rights, Locke was influenced by reports of society among
Native Americans, whom he regarded as natural peoples who lived in a "state of liberty" and perfect freedom, but "not a state of license". It also informed his conception of
social contract. Although he does not say so explicitly, his position implies that even in light of our unique characteristics we should not be treated differently by our neighbors or our rulers. "Locke is arguing that there is no natural characteristic sufficient to distinguish one person from another... of course, there are plenty of natural differences between us" (Haworth 103). What Haworth takes from Locke is that John Locke was obsessed with supporting equality in society, treating everyone as an equal. He does though highlight our differences with his philosophy showing that we are all unique and important to society. In his philosophy, it is highlighted that the ideal government should also protect everyone, and provide rights and freedom to everyone, because we are all important to society. His ideas then were developed into the movements for freedom from the British creating our government. However, his implied thought of freedom for all is applied most heavily in our culture today. Starting with the civil rights movement, and continuing through women's rights, Locke's call for a fair government can be seen as the influence in these movements. His ideas are typically just seen as the foundation for modern democracy; however, it is not unreasonable to credit Locke with the social activism throughout the history of America. By founding this sense of freedom for all, Locke was laying the groundwork for the equality that occurs today. Despite the apparent misuse of his philosophy in early American democracy. The Civil Rights movement and the suffrage movement both called out the state of American democracy during their challenges to the government's view on equality. To them it was clear that when the designers of democracy said all, they meant all people shall receive those natural rights that John Locke cherished so deeply. "a state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another" (Locke II,4). Locke in his papers on natural philosophy clearly states that he wants a government where all are treated equal in freedoms especially. "Locke's views on toleration were very progressive for the time" (Connolly). Authors such as Jacob Connolly confirm that to them Locke was highly ahead of his time with all this progressive thinking. That is that his thought fits our current state of democracy where we strive to make sure that everyone has a say in the government, and everyone has a chance at a good life. Regardless of race, gender, or social standing starting with Locke it was made clear not only that the government should provide rights, but rights to everyone through his social contract. The social contract is an agreement between members of a country to live within a shared system of laws. Specific forms of government are the result of the decisions made by these persons acting in their collective capacity. Government is instituted to make laws that protect the three natural rights. If a government does not properly protect these rights, it can be overthrown.
Thomas Paine Thomas Paine (1731–1809) further elaborated on natural rights in his influential work
Rights of Man (1791), emphasizing that rights cannot be granted by any charter because this would legally imply they can also be revoked and under such circumstances, they would be reduced to privileges:
American individualist anarchists While at first
American individualist anarchists adhered to natural rights positions, later in this era led by
Benjamin Tucker, some abandoned natural rights positions and converted to
Max Stirner's
Egoist anarchism. Rejecting the idea of moral rights, Tucker said there were only two rights: "the right of might" and "the right of contract". He also said, after converting to Egoist individualism, "In times past... it was my habit to talk glibly of the right of man to land. It was a bad habit, and I long ago sloughed it off. ... Man's only right to land is his might over it." According to
Wendy McElroy: Several periodicals were "undoubtedly influenced by
Liberty's presentation of egoism, including
I published by C.L. Swartz, edited by W.E. Gordak and J.W. Lloyd (all associates of
Liberty);
The Ego and
The Egoist, both of which were edited by Edward H. Fulton. Among the egoist papers that Tucker followed were the German
Der Eigene, edited by
Adolf Brand, and
The Eagle and
The Serpent, issued from London. The latter, the most prominent English-language egoist journal, was published from 1898 to 1900 with the subtitle 'A Journal of Egoistic Philosophy and Sociology. also entering into a debate with the Nazi legal theorist
Carl Schmitt on related issues. His concern echoes Locke’s fear of the war-of-all-against-all. His defense is multi-faceted and his primary thesis remains largely implicit—without an operative defense of Natural Right society will disintegrate and nihilisms of the sort that gave rise to the
Third Reich will predominate. Effectively: Natural Right may be repealed in practice yet what remains will not transcend but rather fall short of any organization that could properly be considered ‘social,’ or 'human'--in which the notion of freedom would be rendered meaningless. Whether or not the argument for Natural Right is plausible in an absolutely decisive or purely formal sense it will nevertheless motivate a sufficiently popular self-defense of liberalism against the (equally false or contingent) transcendentalism of fascism, thought
Leo Strauss. Incomplete according to its formal contingency or dependence on popular behavior, Strauss’s argument remains permanently open until such time as liberalism is impracticable or becomes indefensible—seemingly (arguably) supported by the supremacy of liberal republicanism (or representative democratic capitalism) in geopolitics in the later phases of the 20th century, but potentially falling with the failure of the same. ==Contemporary==