Comment in 150 words: Idea of Natural Rights. (2015, 10 Marks)
Natural rights are entitlements a person holds simply by being human, before and apart from any government. Thomas Paine (Rights of Man, 1791) defined them as those which appertain to man in right of his existence. The idea’s decisive move was to turn an old doctrine of natural law, which imposed duties, into one of natural rights, which empower individuals.
From natural law to natural rights
- Marcus Tullius Cicero, voicing the Stoics, held that true law is right reason in agreement with nature, binding on all peoples.
- Thomas Aquinas saw natural law as reason’s share in God’s eternal law. The stress fell on what one owes, not on what one may claim.
- Hugo Grotius (De Jure Belli ac Pacis, 1625) defined a right as a moral quality of a person. This is the subjective turn.
- Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) kept only a right of self-preservation. John Locke (1689) made life, liberty and estate binding on rulers, who hold power in trust; entering society, people surrender only the power to judge and punish, not the rights themselves.
- The American (1776) and French (1789) declarations gave the idea revolutionary force.
Defining features
- Pre-political: discovered by reason, not granted by law.
- Universal, equal and inalienable.
- Mainly negative: they fence off a sphere the state may not enter, making government limited and, when it breaks trust, resistible.
Critiques
- Jeremy Bentham: without a lawgiver there is no right, only a wish dressed as one, and appeals to nature invite disorder.
- Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790): abstract rights, in proportion as they are metaphysically true, … are morally and politically false. Real liberties are an inheritance.
- Karl Marx: they shield the isolated proprietor of bourgeois society.
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, replying to UNESCO in 1947, held that all rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done.
Modern afterlife
- Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974) revived them as side constraints on the state, the basis of the minimal state.
- The Universal Declaration (1948) carried them into human rights, and India’s Part III made them justiciable Fundamental Rights.
Conclusion
Philosophically, the idea is fragile: nature yields no agreed list. Politically, it is indispensable, since it offers a standpoint outside positive law from which unjust law can be judged. It deserves reform, not abandonment: grounded in dignity and secured by institutions.