Legal rights (sometimes also called civil rights or statutory rights) are rights Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement — i.e. rights are normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people, according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical theory. The concept of rights is often fundamental to civilized societies, and it is of vital importance in such disciplines conveyed by a particular polity A polity is a state or one of its subordinate civil authorities, such as a province, prefecture, county, municipality, city, or district. It is generally understood to mean a geographic area with a corresponding government. Thomas Hobbes considered bodies politic in this sense, in Leviathan. In previous centuries, body politic was also understood, codified into legal statutes A statute is a formal written enactment of a legislative authority that governs a state, city, or county. Typically, statutes command or prohibit something, or declare policy. The word is often used to distinguish law made by legislative bodies from case law and the regulations issued by government agencies. Statutes are sometimes referred to as by some form of legislature A legislature is a type of deliberative assembly with the power to pass, amend, and repeal laws. The law created by a legislature is called legislation or statutory law. Legislatures are known by many names, the most common being parliament and congress, although these terms also have more specific meanings. In parliamentary systems of government, (or unenumerated Unenumerated rights are sometimes defined as legal rights inferred from other legal rights that are officiated in a retrievable form codified by law institutions, such as in written constitutions, but are not themselves expressly coded or "enumerated" among the explicit writ of the law. Alternative terminology sometimes used are: natural but implied from enumerated rights), and as such are contingent upon local laws, customs, or beliefs.

In contrast, natural rights (also called moral rights or inalienable rights) are rights which are not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs of a particular society or polity. Natural rights are thus necessarily universal Moral universalism is the meta-ethical position that some system of ethics, or a universal ethic, applies universally, that is, for "all similarly situated individuals", regardless of culture, race, sex, religion, nationality, sexuality, or other distinguishing feature. Moral universalism is opposed to moral nihilism and moral relativism, whereas legal rights are culturally and politically relative Descriptive relativism is the observation that different cultures have different moral standards. Descriptive relativists do not necessarily affirm or deny the existence of a single correct normative appraisal, given the same set of circumstances. Likewise, they do not necessarily make any meta-ethical commitments to the semantics, ontology, or.

Blurring the lines between natural and legal rights, U.S. statesman James Madison James Madison was an American politician and political philosopher who served as the fourth President of the United States (1809–1817) and is considered one of the Founding Fathers of the United States believed that some rights, such as trial by jury A jury trial is a legal proceeding in which a jury either makes a decision or makes findings of fact which are then applied by a judge. It is distinguished from a bench trial, in which a judge or panel of judges make all decisions, are social rights Social rights are rights made by a group of people to maintain social order within a society. The term social rights is sometimes used to distinguish those rights arising from the social contract, in contrast to natural rights which arise from the natural law, but before the establishment of legal rights by positive law. For example, James Madison, arising neither from natural law Natural law or the law of nature has been described as a law whose content is set by nature and that therefore has validity everywhere. As classically used, natural law refers to the use of reason to analyze human nature and deduce binding rules of moral behavior. The phrase natural law is opposed to the positive law (meaning "man-made law& nor from positive law In the strictest sense, it is law made by human beings, that is, "Law actually and specifically enacted or adopted by proper authority for the government of an organized jural society." This term is also sometimes used to refer to the legal philosophy, legal positivism, as distinct from the schools of natural law and legal realism but from the social contract Social contract describes a broad class of theories that try to explain the ways in which people form states to maintain social order. The notion of the social contract implies that the people give up sovereignty to a government or other authority in order to receive or maintain social order through the rule of law. It can also be thought of as an from which a government derives its authority.^[1]

Overview

The question of which (if any) rights Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement — i.e. rights are normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people, according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical theory. The concept of rights is often fundamental to civilized societies, and it is of vital importance in such disciplines are natural and which are merely legal is an important one in philosophy Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. It is distinguished from other ways of addressing fundamental questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument. The word "philosophy" comes from the and politics Politics , is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to behavior within civil governments, but politics has been observed in other group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions. It consists of "social relations involving authority or power" and refers. Critics of the concept of natural rights argue that the only rights that exist are legal rights, while proponents of the concept of natural rights say that documents such as the United States Declaration of Independence The United States Declaration of Independence is a statement adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, which announced that the thirteen American colonies then at war with Great Britain were now independent states, and thus no longer a part of the British Empire. Written primarily by Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration is a formal and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. The Declaration has been translated into at least 375 languages and dialects, making it the most widely translated document in the world. The Declaration arose directly from the demonstrate the usefulness of recognizing natural rights. The focus of natural rights in the United States Declaration of Independence The United States Declaration of Independence is a statement adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, which announced that the thirteen American colonies then at war with Great Britain were now independent states, and thus no longer a part of the British Empire. Written primarily by Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration is a formal is expressed in the legal philosophy known as Declarationism Declarationism is a legal philosophy that incorporates the United States Declaration of Independence into the body of case law on level with the United States Constitution. Its main proponents include Harry V. Jaffa and other members of the Claremont Institute.

The theory of natural law Natural law or the law of nature has been described as a law whose content is set by nature and that therefore has validity everywhere. As classically used, natural law refers to the use of reason to analyze human nature and deduce binding rules of moral behavior. The phrase natural law is opposed to the positive law (meaning "man-made law& is closely related to the theory of natural rights. During the Age of Enlightenment The Age of Enlightenment is the era in Western philosophy and intellectual, scientific and cultural life, centered upon the eighteenth century, in which reason was advocated as the primary source and legitimacy for authority, natural law theory challenged the divine right of kings The Divine Right of Kings is a political and religious doctrine of royal absolutism. It asserts that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority, deriving his right to rule directly from the will of God. The king is thus not subject to the will of his people, the aristocracy, or any other estate of the realm, including the church. According to, and became an alternative justification for the establishment of a social contract Social contract describes a broad class of theories that try to explain the ways in which people form states to maintain social order. The notion of the social contract implies that the people give up sovereignty to a government or other authority in order to receive or maintain social order through the rule of law. It can also be thought of as an, positive law In the strictest sense, it is law made by human beings, that is, "Law actually and specifically enacted or adopted by proper authority for the government of an organized jural society." This term is also sometimes used to refer to the legal philosophy, legal positivism, as distinct from the schools of natural law and legal realism, and government A government is the organization, or agency through which a political unit exercises its authority, controls and administers public policy, and directs and controls the actions of its members or subjects — and thus legal rights — in the form of classical republicanism Classical republicanism is a form of republicanism originating from and inspired by the governmental forms and writings of classical antiquity. After a gaping centuries-long period of neglect due to unique arrangements of medieval feudalism lasting until the Renaissance, its main ideas were recovered and went on to flourish during Classicism and. Conversely, the concept of natural rights is used by some anarchists Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. It seeks to diminish or even abolish authority in the conduct of human relations. Anarchists may widely disagree on what additional criteria are required in anarchism. The Oxford Companion to to challenge the legitimacy of all such establishments.^[2][3]

The idea of human rights Human rights are "rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled." Proponents of the concept usually assert that everyone is endowed with certain entitlements merely by reason of being human is also closely related to that of natural rights; some recognize no difference between the two and regard both as labels for the same thing, while others choose to keep the terms separate to eliminate association with some features traditionally associated with natural rights.^[4] Natural rights, in particular, are considered beyond the authority of any government or international body An intergovernmental organization, sometimes rendered as an international governmental organization and both abbreviated as IGO, is an organization composed primarily of sovereign states , or of other intergovernmental organizations. Intergovernmental organizations are often called international organizations, although that term may also include to dismiss. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. The Declaration has been translated into at least 375 languages and dialects, making it the most widely translated document in the world. The Declaration arose directly from the is an important legal instrument Legal instrument is a legal term of art that is used for any formally executed writing that can be formally attributed to its author, records and formally expresses a legally enforceable act, process, or contractual duty, obligation, or right, and therefore evidences that act, process, or agreement. Examples include a certificate, deed, bond, enshrining one conception of natural rights into international soft law The term "soft law" refers to quasi-legal instruments which do not have any legally binding force, or whose binding force is somewhat "weaker" than the binding force of traditional law, often contrasted with soft law by being referred to as "hard law". Traditionally, the term "soft law" is associated with.

The idea that animals have natural rights Animal rights, also referred to as animal liberation, is the idea that the most basic interests of non-human animals should be afforded the same consideration as the similar interests of human beings. Advocates approach the issue from different philosophical positions, but agree that animals should be viewed as non-human persons and members of the is one that has gained the interest of philosophers and legal scholars in the 20th century^[5], and as such, even on a natural rights conception of human rights, the two terms may not be synonymous.

History

While the existence of legal rights has always been uncontroversial, the idea that certain rights are natural or inalienable also has a long history dating back at least to the Stoics Stoicism was a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early 3rd century BC. The Stoics considered destructive emotions to be the result of errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not suffer such emotions. Stoics were concerned with the active of late Antiquity Late Antiquity is a periodization used by historians to describe the time of transition from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages, in both mainland Europe and the Mediterranean world. Precise boundaries for the period are a matter of debate, but noted historian of the period Peter Brown proposed a period between the second and eighth centuries and Islamic law Sharia is the sacred law of Islam. All Muslims believe Sharia is God's law, but they have differences between themselves as to exactly what it entails. Modernists, traditionalists and fundamentalists all hold different views of Sharia, as do adherents to different schools of Islamic thought and scholarship. Different countries and cultures have of the early Middle Ages The Middle Ages is a period of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The period followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, and preceded the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period in a three-period division of history: Classical, Medieval, and Modern. The term "Middle Ages" (medium aevum) was coined in, and descending through the Protestant Reformation The Protestant Reformation was the European Christian reform movement that established Protestantism as a constituent branch of contemporary Christianity. It began in 1517 when Martin Luther published The Ninety-Five Theses, and concluded in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia that ended one hundred and thirty-one years of consecutive European and the Age of Enlightenment The Age of Enlightenment is the era in Western philosophy and intellectual, scientific and cultural life, centered upon the eighteenth century, in which reason was advocated as the primary source and legitimacy for authority to today.

Ancient history

The Stoics Stoicism was a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early 3rd century BC. The Stoics considered destructive emotions to be the result of errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not suffer such emotions. Stoics were concerned with the active held that no one was a slave by their nature; slavery was an external condition juxtaposed to the internal freedom of the soul (sui juris). Seneca the Younger Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tutor and later advisor to emperor Nero. He was later forced to commit suicide for complicity in the Pisonian conspiracy to assassinate this last of the Julio-Claudian emperors; wrote:

Medieval history

The notion of inalienable rights Legal rights are rights conveyed by a particular polity, codified into legal statutes by some form of legislature (or unenumerated but implied from enumerated rights), and as such are contingent upon local laws, customs, or beliefs was found in early Islamic law Sharia is the sacred law of Islam. All Muslims believe Sharia is God's law, but they have differences between themselves as to exactly what it entails. Modernists, traditionalists and fundamentalists all hold different views of Sharia, as do adherents to different schools of Islamic thought and scholarship. Different countries and cultures have and jurisprudence Fiqh is Islamic jurisprudence. Fiqh is an expansion of the Sharia Islamic law—based directly on the Quran and Sunnah—that complements Shariah with evolving rulings/interpretations of Islamic jurists, which denied a ruler "the right to take away from his subjects certain rights which inhere in his or her person as a human being." Islamic rulers could not take away certain rights from their subjects on the basis that "they become rights by reason Reason is a mental faculty found in humans, that is able to generate conclusions from assumptions or premises. In other words, it is amongst other things the means by which rational beings propose reasons, or explanations of cause and effect. In contrast to reason as an abstract noun, a reason is a consideration which explains or justifies of the fact that they are given to a subject by a law and from a source which no ruler can question or alter."^[7]

In addition, early Islamic jurists Ulama , also spelt ulema, refers to the educated class of Muslim legal scholars engaged in the several fields of Islamic studies. They are best known as the arbiters of shari‘a law. While the ulama are well versed in legal jurisprudence being Islamic lawyers, some of them also go on to specialize in other fields, such as philosophy, dialectical, from the 8th century to the 16th century, made a distinction between the huquq Allah ("rights of God") and huquq al-ibad ("rights of individuals"). The former were based on the rights established in the Qur'an and Sunnah Qur'an and Sunnah is an often quoted Islamic term regarding the sources of Islam, while the latter resembled the concept of natural law Natural law or the law of nature has been described as a law whose content is set by nature and that therefore has validity everywhere. As classically used, natural law refers to the use of reason to analyze human nature and deduce binding rules of moral behavior. The phrase natural law is opposed to the positive law (meaning "man-made law&. This arose from the Istislah Istislah is a method employed by Muslim jurists to solve problems that find no clear answer in sacred religious texts. It is related to the term مصلحة Maslaha, or "public interest" (both words being derived from the same triconsonantal root, "s-l-h"). Extra-textual pragmatic considerations are accepted in Islamic method, developed in order to deal with new issues that find no clear answer in the sacred religious texts. Many early Islamic jurists thus resorted to "background values concerning inherent qualities of the individual" in order to deal with these issues, incorporating "naturalistic reasoning in their juridical analyses." They applied the "rights of God" and "rights of individuals" as "an interpretive mechanism to frame their naturalistic assumptions and apply them in legal analysis to create and distribute rights, duties, and public commitments."^[8]

These early Islamic legal concepts may have later influenced John Locke's concept of inalienable rights through his attendance of lectures given by Edward Pococke, a professor of Arabic studies.^[9]

Modern history

Centuries later, the Stoic doctrine that the "inner part cannot be delivered into bondage"^[10] re-emerged in the Reformation doctrine of liberty of conscience. 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. These ideas were 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."^[12] 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 governed republic, 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 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." As 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."^[13] In his earlier (1725) Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 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.” However, Hutcheson 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 publick Good."^[14]

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. But the same would not apply to those aspects that make one a person, wrote Hegel:

Thus 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. However, many social contract theorists reasoned 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 them from abuse, and living henceforth under the legal rights of that authority.

But 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.^[16] The de facto inalienability arguments of the 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, Richard Price in England sided with the Americans' claim "that Great Britain is attempting to rob them of that liberty to which every member of society and all civil communities have a natural and unalienable title."^[18] 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.^[19] Any social contract or compact allegedly alienating these rights would be non-binding and void, wrote Price:

Price raised a furor of opposition so in 1777 he wrote another tract that clarified his position and again restated the de facto basis for the argument that the "liberty of men as agents is that power of self-determination which all agents, as such, possess."^[21] 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"^[23], and in the 1776 United States Declaration of Independence, famously condensed this to:

In the nineteenth century, the movement to abolish slavery seized this passage as a statement of constitutional principle, although the U.S. constitution recognized and protected 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:

Contemporary history

Many documents now echo the phrase used in the United States Declaration of Independence. The preamble to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts that rights are inalienable: "recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world." Article 1, §1 of the California Constitution recognizes inalienable rights, and articulated some (not all) of those rights as "defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy." However, there is still much dispute over which "rights" are truly natural rights and which are not, and the concept of natural or inalienable rights is still controversial to some.

Contemporary political philosophies continuing the liberal tradition of natural rights include libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism and Objectivism, and include amongst their canon the works of authors such as Robert Nozick, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand^[24], and Murray Rothbard^{[citation needed]}. A libertarian view of inalienable rights is laid out in Morris and Linda Tannehill's The Market for Liberty, which claims that a man has a right to ownership over his life and therefore also his property, because he has invested time (i.e. part of his life) in it and thereby made it an extension of his life. However, if he initiates force against and to the detriment of another man, he alienates himself from the right to that part of his life which is required to pay his debt: "Rights are not inalienable, but only the possessor of a right can alienate himself from that right – no one else can take a man's rights from him."^[25]

Legal rights documents

The specific enumeration of legal rights accorded to people has historically differed greatly from one century to the next, and from one regime to the next, but nowadays is normally addressed by the constitutions of the respective nations. The following documents have each played important historical roles in establishing legal rights norms around the world.

• The Magna Carta (1215; England) required the King of England to renounce certain rights and respect certain legal procedures, and to accept that the will of the king could be bound by law.
• The Declaration of Arbroath (1320; Scotland) established the right of the people to choose a head of state (see Popular sovereignty).
• The Bill of Rights (1689; England) declared that Englishmen, as embodied by Parliament, possess certain civil and political rights.
• The Claim of Right (1689; Scotland) was one of the key documents of Scottish constitutional law.
• United States Declaration of Independence (1776) succinctly defined the rights of man as "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" which later influenced "liberté, égalité, fraternité" (liberty, equality, fraternity) in France^[26] The phrase can also be found in Chapter III, Article 13 of the 1947 Constitution of Japan, and in President Ho Chi Minh's 1945 declaration of independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. An alternative phrase "life, liberty and property", is found in the Declaration of Colonial Rights, a resolution of the First Continental Congress. Also, Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads, "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person."
• Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1785; United States) Written by Thomas Jefferson in 1779, the document asserted the right of man to form a personal relationship with God without interference by the state.
• The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789; France) was one of the fundamental documents of the French Revolution, defining a set of individual rights and collective rights of the people.
• The United States Bill of Rights (1789/1791; United States), the first ten amendments of the United States Constitution, was another influential document.
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) is an over-arching set of standards by which governments, organisations and individuals would measure their behaviour towards each other. The preamble declares that the "...recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world..."
• The European Convention on Human Rights (1950; Europe) was adopted under the auspices of the Council of Europe to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms.
• The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) is a follow-up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, concerning civil and political rights.
• The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) is another follow-up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, concerning economic, social and cultural rights.
• The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982; Canada) was created to protect the rights of Canadian citizens from actions and policies of all levels of government.
• The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000) is one of the most recent legal instruments concerning human rights.

Natural rights theories

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 Declaration of Independence, meanwhile, is based upon the "self-evident" truth that "all men are ... endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights"^[27].

Likewise, different philosophers and statesmen 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.” ^[28] 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.

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)

According to Hobbes, to deny this right would be absurd, just as it would be absurd to expect that carnivores might reject meat or fish stop swimming. Hobbes sharply distinguished this natural "liberty", from natural "laws" (obligations), 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." (ibid.)

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." (ibid.)

This would lead inevitably to a situation known as the "war of all against all", in which human beings kill, steal and enslave others in order 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 in order 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 rendered insignificant - "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. However, some thinkers such as Leo Strauss, maintained that Hobbes kept the primacy of natural law or moral obligation over natural rights, and thus did not fully break with medieval thought.

John Locke

John Locke (1632–1704), was another prominent Western philosopher who conceptualized rights as natural and inalienable. Like Hobbes, Locke was a major social contract thinker. He said that man's natural rights are life, liberty, and property. He greatly influenced the American Revolutionary War with his writings of natural rights.

According to Locke there are three natural rights:

• Life- everyone is entitled to live once they are created.
• Liberty- everyone is entitled to do anything they want to so long as it doesn't conflict with the first right.
• Estate- everyone is entitled to own all they create or gain through gift or trade so long as it doesn't conflict with the first two rights.

The social contract is a contract between a being or beings of power and their people or followers. The King makes the laws to protect the 3 natural rights. The people may not agree on the laws, but they have to follow them. The people can be prosecuted and/or killed if they break these laws. If the King does not follow these rules, he 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:

It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect — that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few. ... They...consequently are instruments of injustice.

The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a contract with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.

Debate

The concept of inalienable rights was criticized by Jeremy Bentham and Edmund Burke as groundless. Bentham and Burke, writing in the eighteenth century, 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".

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". Critics^[who?], however, could argue that use of the word "Creator" signifies that these rights are based on theological principles, and might question which theological principles those are, or why those theological principles should be accepted by people who do not adhere to the religion from which they are derived^{[citation needed]}. 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 contract – that rights and responsibilities are derived from a consensual contract between the government and the people – is the most widely recognized alternative.

Samuel P. Huntington, an American political scientist, wrote that the "inalienable rights" argument from the Declaration of Independence was necessary because "The British were white, Anglo, and Protestant, just as we were. They had to have some other basis on which to justify independence".^{[citation needed]}

Different philosophers have created different lists of rights they consider to be natural. Proponents of natural rights, in particular Hesselberg and Rothbard, have responded that reason can be applied to separate truly axiomatic rights from supposed rights, stating that any principle that requires itself to be disproved is an axiom. Critics have pointed to the lack of agreement between the proponents as evidence for the claim that the idea of natural rights is merely a political tool. For instance, Jonathan Wallace has asserted that there is no basis on which to claim that some rights are natural, and he argued that Hobbes' account of natural rights confuses right with ability (human beings have the ability to seek only their own good and follow their nature in the same way as animals, but this does not imply that they have a right to do so).^[29] Wallace advocates a social contract, much like Hobbes and Locke, but does not base it on natural rights:

We are all at a table together, deciding which rules to adopt, free from any vague constraints, half-remembered myths, anonymous patriarchal texts and murky concepts of nature. If I propose something you do not like, tell me why it is not practical, or harms somebody, or is counter to some other useful rule; but don't tell me it offends the universe.

Other critics^[who?] have argued that the attempt to derive rights from "natural law" or "human nature" is an example of the is-ought problem. However, the term "natural" in "natural rights" refers to the opposite of "artificial", rather than meaning "physical" as it does in the sense of ethical naturalism, which according to G.E. Moore does suffer the is-ought problem in the form of the naturalistic fallacy.

See also

• Rights
• Human rights
• Natural law
• Positive law

References

1. ^ Introduction of the Bill of Rights in Congress, 1789 Jun 8, Jul 21, Aug 13, 18-19; Annals 1:424-50, 661-65, 707-17, 757-59, 766.
2. ^ Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty
3. ^ Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty
4. ^ Jones, Peter. Rights. Palgrave Macmillan, 1994, p. 73.
5. ^ "Animal Rights", Encyclopædia Britannica, 2007; Dershowitz, Alan. Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights, 2004, pp. 198–99; "Animal Rights: The Modern Animal Rights Movement", Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2007.
6. ^ Seneca, De beneficiis, III, 20.
7. ^ Judge Weeramantry, Christopher G. (1997), Justice Without Frontiers, Brill Publishers, pp. 8, 132, 135, ISBN 9041102418
8. ^ Emon, Anver M. (2006), "Huquq Allah and Huquq Al-Ibad: A Legal Heuristic for a Natural Rights Regime", Islamic Law and Society 13: 325-391 [325]
9. ^ Judge Weeramantry, Christopher G. (1997), Justice Without Frontiers, Brill Publishers, pp. 8, 135, 139–40, ISBN 9041102418
10. ^ Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Cornell University Press, 1966, p. 77.
11. ^ Martin Luther, Concerning Secular Authority, 1523.
12. ^ Pauline Maier,American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, p. 134.
13. ^ Hutcheson, Francis. A System of Moral Philosophy. London, 1755, pp. 261-2.
14. ^ Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises (Indianapolis, 2004), pp. 192, 193.
15. ^ Georg W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, T.M. Knox, trans., New York: Oxford University Press, 1967 (1821), section 66.
16. ^ Philmore, J. 1982. The Libertarian Case for Slavery: A Note on Nozick. Philosophical Forum. XIV (Fall 1982): 43-58.
17. ^ Cassirer, Ernst. The Myth of the State. Yale University Press, 1963, p. 175
18. ^ Price, Richard. Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty. 1776, Part I. Reprinted in: Peach, Bernard, (Ed.) Richard Price and the Ethical Foundations of the American Revolution. Duke University Press, 1979, p. 67.
19. ^ Ibid., pp. 67-68.
20. ^ Ibid., pp. 78-79
21. ^ Price, Richard. Additional Observations on the Nature and Value of Civil Liberty. Reprinted in: Peach, Bernard, (Ed.) Richard Price and the Ethical Foundations of the American Revolution. Duke University Press, 1979, p. 136.
22. ^ Lynd, Staughton. Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism. Vintage Books, 1969, pp. 56-57.
23. ^ Garry Wills, 1979. Inventing America. New York: Vintage Books, p. 213
24. ^ http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/individual_rights.html
25. ^ "Man and Society". The Market for Liberty. pp. 11.
26. ^ Dyck, Rand (2000). Canadian Politics: Critical Approaches (3rd edition). Thomas Nelson. ISBN 978-0176167929.
27. ^ United States Declaration of Independence
28. ^ Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, T. H. Green, 1883, p.114.
29. ^ Wallace, Jonathan (2000-04). "Natural Rights Don't Exist". The Ethical Spectacle. http://www.spectacle.org/0400/natural.html. Retrieved 2007-08-23.

Further reading

• Fruehwald, Edwin, A Biological Basis of Rights, 19 Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 195 (2010).
• Grotius, Hugo, The Rights Of War And Peace: Three Volume Set, 1625
• Haakonssen, Knud, Grotius, Pufendorf and Modern Natural Law, 1999
• Hutcheson, Francis. A System of Moral Philosophy. 1755, London.
• Locke, John. Two Treatises on Government. 1690 (primarily the second treatise)
• Lloyd Thomas, D.A. Locke on Government. 1995, Routledge. ISBN 0-415-09533-6
• Pufendorf, Baron Samuel von, Law of Nature and Nations, 1625
• Tuck, Richard, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development, 1982
• Waldron, Jeremy [ed.] Theories of Rights 1984, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-875063-3

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