Natural Rights

Part 1
Two approaches to the defence of Political Absolutism:
1. Response to the theory of natural hierarchy
2. Response to the theory of contractual subjection to absolute authority
God has established an order of specifically political authority in the world
God was thought to have nominated one or several individuals or kings of the nations of
earth and to have established a procedure for their succession through inheritance.
(Known as ‘patriarcha’ by Sir Robert Filmer)
 Lockean theory of natural rights is the first response to the view of Natural Hierarchy
According to Locke, the natural condition of man is one in which:
 No one has more power than the other
 All power and jurisdiction are reciprocal
 There is nothing more evident than creatures of same species, born with the same
advantages of nature use same faculties.
Locke argued that the knowledge of who was the rightful heir of the authority appointed by the
Divine Lord had been lost and that in all races of mankind there remains the least pretence to
have the Right of Inheritance.
Objectives of Doctrine of Natural Equality
 Evident ignorance between differences of age, strength, wisdom and virtue among human
beings
 Locke’s theory asserted that though every man is different in age, experience, excellence
and merit; there is equal freedom of rights available to them without being subject to any
authority of other man (Doctrine of Natural Equality was associated with freedom)
 Hobbes: “When all is so reckoned together, difference between man and man is not so
considerable because one man can claim to himself any benefit to which another may not
pretend. There is no superman above man who rules over man.”

“Men were born free, not subject to any political allegiance or obedience.”
Criticisms of the above statement
1. Contradiction to natural facts of infancy (Locke)
 Children are born not only in a state of dependence but also where their liberty is
continually infringed
  This sort of subjection was different from subjection to political authority. It was
a parental authority
 The point of parental authority was to prepare child for future political subjection
but the point of education was for the purpose of gaining maturity and rationality.

2. Men are born as slaves (Bentham)

 Bentham considered the idea of ‘All men are free’ as absurd and sheer nonsense.
He contended that many men are born slaves and they do not have full liberty.
 Men were not necessarily born free as a matter of fact but were born with a title to
perfect freedom. The aim of natural right theories was to criticize those societies
in which people were oppressed from birth
 Such oppression resulted in the violation of rooms of natural law which required
people to respect one another’s freedom
If authority was not divinely appointed, then it could only be the product of free and equal
individuals coming together and choosing to set up political institutions which reflected their
apprehensions of necessity in their life.
Political society was an artificial institution set up to promote the interests and serve the needs of
those who constituted it. If it did not serve the purpose for which it was instituted, then it should
be discarded and replaced by a new one.
Absolutism (Conventionalist theory)
Humans might be free and independent but in pursuit of stability and other benefits like safety
and security, they seem to give away their liberty to the absolute authority – to a ruler. They
might sell themselves as slaves.
Richard Tuck proposed ideas to abstain from Absolutism:
 To concede the possibility that men and women might sell themselves into slavery but as
a matter of fact, no one would ever bargain away all his rights or all of his liberty
 Hobbes commented on this by saying that it was human psychology not charity which
precluded human beings to abandon all of one’s rights. He said that unless we are bound
by the performance of authority, no one would ever want them to hurt them.
The strategy which nourished the tradition of natural rights were the idea of certain duties being
imposed by natural law
Inalienability of Rights
 Locke contended that political power could not possibly be absolutely arbitrary over the
people. Nobody can transfer to another, more power than that he has in himself; nobody
has an absolute arbitrary power over himself to destroy his own life.
 Inalienability of rights could be seen not merely as inalienable privileges but which are
correlative to the duties of others including political authorities.
  Rulers, like all men had a duty to not harm their subjects. Even conventional political
authority must be limited by constraints of natural law.
 Natural rights could not be waived in order to secure any earthly benefit, they were to be
understood in the context of eternal purposes of the divine ruler of mankind, the
oppressive and arbitrary politics could not make any difference to the wrongness of
absolutism.
Relation between natural rights and divine law of nature was complex
Divine law entered the natural rights theory in three ways:
1. In the denial that there was any natural basis for the political hierarchy or natural
rulership
2. In the claim that each person has a duty to secure their own survival and flourish in the
world
3. In the view that natural law-imposed duties on us to respect and assist others in this duty
which no one can waive or set aside in the name of political absolutism.
Part 2
Locke’s approach was dependent upon divine law which said that rights represented the respect
owed by ourselves and others to our nature and status as creatures of God.
Locke very negatively argued that God had never designated anyone with any special mark of
authority rather on any specific manifestation of divine command. He contended that rights as
constraints were derived from God’s command and God’s purpose in creating us.
In we dispense solely and wholly with God, in our metaphysics, we would lose the moral
constraint
Metaphysics focuses on how reality and the universe began
Enlightenment Philosophy
There was a downward trend noticed where the belief in God started to disappear with time.
The concept of deism came into picture which is understood as that God existed and created the
world but God has no active engagement in the world except creation of human reason
When divine law was in doubt, there were three things that were concerned about the natural
law:
1. Nature; functioning independently
2. Reason; coincident with conclusion with faith in political matters
3. Consensus; convergence of all nations and people on certain standards of behaviour
However, none of the above methods provided a relevant derogation against the Enlightenment
scepticism.
1. Nature
Considered to be a divine creation
Certain rights must be inalienable
David Hume pointed out that nature considered in itself has no more regard to good above evil
than that to heat above cold. For Hume, the connection between ought and is reflected a deep
conviction that our perception of the world revealed an external order that was indifferent to
human purpose or concerns.
2. Reason
It offered no firm foundation for principles of right
Reason requires premises; if premise were not given by God or by nature, then it must have the
character of ‘intuitions’
Task of finding intuitions which could serve as premises is difficult; intuitions could combine the
necessary degree of self-evidence with the substance which could result in possible conclusions
The most plausible conclusion could be the ‘Idea of Utility’ (pleasure that everyone sought for
themselves): Theory of Utilitarianism
Idea of Utility focused on pleasure or happiness to be the good and its maximization and evil or
bad and its minimization
However, the idea of rights was on shaky ground. Idea of rights could not offer the sort of
reasoned scientific arguments from premises to conclusions like the idea of utility did.
The proposition of rights was simply extracted and announced, they were not deduced from any
principle.
3. Consensus
As said by Denis Diderot, consensus was not for private men but in the ‘general will of the
species’
The idea was that natural law could be inferred as a sort of the lowest common denominator of
all the laws
Enlightenment anthropology had reached the exact conclusions as what Locke suggested. What
appeared evident in one society seemed absurd in another. There was no basis of human
consensus and was not of the sort that universal principle’s proponents of natural rights were
aiming at.
Furthermore, Enlightenment philosophy not only discovered moral dissensus but it also
dominated all subsequent study of human societies; which understood local moralities as natural
phenomenon and correlation between different modes with different conditions under which
human beings lived.
However, that project threatened natural law in its mood and implications. It created norms as
facts, turned the customs and practices which were so varied in nature with ‘natural law’. There
is quite a small possibility of ‘no-consensus’ when the conditions in which humans lived and
varied in thoughts.
Part 3
It was clearly understood in the previous two parts as to how the Enlightenment philosophy has
been an embarrassment. There were also some embarrassments for the rights theories
In its classical form, the idea of natural rights was associated with the theory of the social
contract
The claim was that the existing political relationships were found as an original
agreement among the people living together in a given territory and the protection of their
rights
It was thought that people would have met together and entrusted all their powers to
specialized agencies and the authority is developed under the original agreement; they
were answerable for the performance of their functions in the last resort to the people
who had vested this authority in them
Social contract generated a theory of obligation on the part of the individual citizen
In principle, natural rights stand independent of the social contract theory
If people have certain rights in virtue of their human nature, those rights ought to be
respected by the powers that be, no matter how their power was instituted
“Social Contract seen as Utopian aspiration”
Instead of saying that the government has in the past been based on popular consent, we might
call instead for a government of the future to be instituted on that basis – as a precondition for
human freedom and progress
Rousseau: “Man was born free but everywhere he is in chains”
The social contract is described as what would be a genuinely free political order – ‘taking men
as they are and laws as they might be’
It does not matter if such order even existed, as Rousseau argued that such order’s existence only
will generate hope of reconciling power with liberty and political authority with moral autonomy
of an individual
Rousseau’s theory suggested that no existing regime could be legitimate. For him, the sovereign
acts of people were something to look forward to. A free polity would be one in which people
choose the fundamental laws and people choose the structure of the government