Theories of Rights: Natural

RIGHTS, NATURAL. The idea of natural rights is inseparable from the doctrine that all human beings, regardless of extrinsic differences in circumstance (nationality, class, religion) or physical condition (race, gender, age, etc.), share an identical set of powers, freedoms, and/or competencies. Scholars have customarily treated natural rights theory as a hallmark of modern legal and political thought, although one with roots in preceding intellectual traditions. In particular, the idea of natural rights has been contrasted with earlier teachings about natural law that were grounded in more robust principles of reason and natural or divine teleology. Many important thinkers of early modern Europe subscribed to a version of natural law without endorsing a doctrine of natural rights.

Central to the concept of natural rights is the view that every human being enjoys a complete and exclusive dominion over his or her mental and bodily facilities—and the fruits thereof—in the form of personal property. Thus, a natural rights theory entails a conception of private ownership grounded on the subjective status of the individual human being. The rights arising from such human subjectivity are both inalienable and imprescriptible in the sense that any attempt to renounce or extinguish them would constitute at the same time the cessation of one's personhood. Thus, for example, natural rights theory renders incoherent arguments for slavery based on alleged natural inequalities of intellect or physique.

Consequently, an important feature of the fully developed idea of natural rights is its direct and immediate political bearing. Given that natural rights may not be curtailed or eliminated without the denial to a person of his or her very humanity, any government that attempts to suppress them without due process has no claim on the obedience of its citizens. Natural rights always take precedence over artificial communal or public rights that might be imposed by political institutions. In this way, the doctrine of natural rights circumscribes political power and may even generate a defense of resistance to or revolution against systems of government that violate the rights of individuals.

The assertion of the modernity of natural rights theory must be qualified by the recognition that many of its characteristic elements were present in and elaborated by earlier theorists. For instance, scholars have found in Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) the logical rudiments of natural rights theory, albeit imperfectly articulated and applied. The language of rights was first clearly expressed in the teachings of classical Roman lawyers, for whom ius ('right' or 'law') constituted the basis of law and persons were fundamentally bearers of rights derived from law. Likewise, medieval canon (church) lawyers and Scholastic philosophers insisted that God endowed human beings with basic rights to themselves and to those goods that they required to preserve their divinely created lives.

Many attempts have been made to identify the "first" theorist of natural rights. In addition to Aristotle, the Scholastic philosopher/theologians Jean de Paris (c. 1240–1306; also known as John of Paris), William of Ockham (c. 1285–1349), and Jean de Gerson (1363–1429) have been nominated. Several of the participants in the fourteenth-century controversy between the papacy and the members of the spiritual wing of the Franciscan Order over the status of voluntary ecclesiastical poverty also moved the debate about the naturalness of property ownership in the direction of a theory of rights. Yet in each instance, some of the ingredients central to the fully "subjective" or individualistic doctrine of natural rights doctrine associated with modern thought are absent.

It is perhaps best to examine the development of the theory of natural rights after 1450 as an incremental process. Various thinkers contributed important dimensions to its history without necessarily enunciating the idea in its final form or perhaps even appreciating the wider significance of their particular contributions. One such source may be found in the work of a group of theologians of a Thomist orientation working at the University of Paris in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, most prominently Conrad Summenhart (c. 1455–1502), John Mair (c. 1468–1550), and Jacques Almain (c. 1480–1515). In a number of writings, these authors equated ius with dominium ('lordship' or 'ownership'), which was understood to reside in people naturally and to license in them the power or faculty of acquiring those objects necessary for self-preservation. Their argument was as much theological as legal or philosophical: just as God enjoyed ultimate ownership of the earth and the rest of his creations by virtue of his will, so human beings, in whom God's image resided, could claim dominion over themselves and their property.

The Reformation brought further refinement and application of the idea of natural rights. On the Protestant side, rights theory became a major element of late sixteenth-century Huguenot efforts to ground the justification of resistance to governments that imposed doctrinal conformity upon religious dissenters. While the earliest generations of Reformers had looked toward duty to God in order to justify acts of political disobedience, a noticeable change in language and concepts occurred in the wake of the St. Bartholomew Day's Massacre of 1572. In their reactions to the massacre, Théodore de Bèze (1519–1605) and Philippe du Plessis Mornay (1549–1623; also known as Duplessis-Mornay), as well as the authors of a large body of anonymous texts, argued for a condition of natural liberty—a privilege of nature whose rightful withdrawal is impossible—that precedes the creation of political society. Hence, any subsequent government must result from, and must be consonant with, the basic natural state of humanity. And those who would use political power to deny to human beings the exercise of their liberty—including the freedom of conscience to dissent from the established Roman Church—may properly and licitly be challenged with forms of resistance to their tyranny. The Huguenots stopped short, however, of advocating popular rebellion. Instead, they looked to so-called intermediary magistrates as the appropriate instigators of resistance to tyrannical conduct. Hence, in the hands of sixteenth-century Reformers, the idea of natural rights became a stimulus for a religiopolitical movement that directly opposed forms of religious intolerance and suppression of dissent.