Analyse the relation between natural rights and human rights. (2013, 20 Marks)
Human rights are the heirs of natural rights, but heirs who rewrote the inheritance. Article 1 of the French Declaration of 1789 reads men are born and remain free and equal in rights; Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) reads all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. The echo is deliberate, though after 1945 the older vocabulary gave way. The relation combines shared structure, changed foundation and scope, and contested continuity.
What human rights inherit
- Held as human, not as citizen. Both are entitlements one has by being human, not by a ruler’s grant. That is why a government can violate a right it never recognised.
- Formal features. Universality, inalienability, priority to the state, and use as a standard for judging law all pass from one to the other.
- The strong sense. For John Locke, rights were claims that government existed to protect. For Thomas Hobbes, the right of nature was a mere liberty; the subject is free in the silence of the law. In Ronald Dworkin‘s terms, that is a weak-sense right (a permission), not a strong-sense one (a claim the state wrongs by denying). Human rights inherit Locke’s strong sense.
Where they depart
- Foundation. Locke’s rights rested on God’s workmanship and natural law. The 1948 drafters dropped a proposal to invoke God and grounded rights in dignity, leaving the ultimate reason open. The Third Committee also deleted by nature from Article 1, a change Peng Chun Chang backed to avoid theological dispute. Human rights rest on agreement without a shared metaphysics.
- Content. Natural rights were a short list of negative liberties. The Declaration adds social security, work, rest and education. Classical theorists would not have called these natural: they bind a particular community to provide.
- Machinery. Natural rights licensed revolution against one’s own ruler. Human rights live in treaties, courts and peer review: they are matters of international concern.
- Rival readings. James Griffin (On Human Rights, 2008) keeps the naturalistic line, grounding them in normative agency. Charles R. Beitz (The Idea of Human Rights, 2009) reads them through their role in international practice. Samuel Moyn (The Last Utopia, 2010) dates human rights as a mass movement only to the 1970s, making the descent partly retrospective.
How the critiques shaped the relation
Human rights are, in part, natural rights corrected by their critics. Jeremy Bentham mocked unenforceable rights, so human rights were positivised in covenants and courts. Karl Marx exposed the egoism of the rights of man, so socio-economic claims entered the canon. Upendra Baxi (The Future of Human Rights, 2002) distinguishes “modern” rights, which excluded colonised peoples, women and slaves, from “contemporary” rights authored increasingly by the violated themselves.
The Indian synthesis
- The Constitution positivised the inheritance: justiciable Part III for liberties, non-justiciable Part IV for social rights, reproducing the old split.
- Maneka Gandhi (1978) required any procedure under Article 21 to be fair, just and reasonable, opening the door to livelihood, health and education.
- Puttaswamy (2017) called life and liberty inalienable, inhering in the person rather than conferred by the state: natural-rights reasoning inside constitutional law.
- The Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993 defines human rights as rights relating to life, liberty, equality and dignity guaranteed by the Constitution or the Covenants and enforceable in Indian courts.
Conclusion
The relation is secularised and institutionalised descent: continuity in structure, discontinuity in ground and scope. Human rights kept natural rights’ claim against power while trading metaphysics for agreement and machinery. That trade explains both their wide assent and their thin foundation.