Human Rights

Natural Rights

The concept of human rights has its roots in thinking about natural rights. Natural rights adherents, such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, held that every individual person enjoys particular rights naturally. That is, human beings possess certain rights in virtue of their natural existence, for example, their status as human beings. Natural rights adherents claim that only human beings hold natural rights: all “rights” (in their terminology) were “human rights” (in our more modern language). It seems reasonable to suppose that such a view of natural rights originates from the belief that God gave pride of place to human beings over the earth and its creatures. Natural rights adherents do not tend to claim that nonhumans possess rights of any variety.

Natural rights became an important concept in Enlightenment political thought, helping map the boundaries of a monarch's political power over his people. For Hobbes, people all shared the right to self-preservation: All human beings held this right in virtue of being born. This was a major break from traditional Western thought, which held that individual people only held those rights granted to them by their king. For example, one might have a right to a particular property, but only in virtue of the monarch suspending his right over it. A person's rights are therefore held at the discretion of the monarch. In contrast, natural rights theorists claimed that each individual human being has rights independent of the monarch's discretion. These natural rights exist in virtue of an individual's status as a human being, and these rights set limits on the exercise of political power over individuals.

How does someone know he or she has natural rights? In keeping with prevalent Enlightenment thinking, natural rights theorists claimed that the use of “natural” (or God-given) reason could discern which rights human beings held, rights that placed justified limits on the political authority of monarchs. For example, philosophers, such as Hobbes and Locke, argued that one could discover a right to self-preservation. In their view, people living without being organized within some form of political community exist in an anarchic state of nature where their livelihood is insecure. People enter into a political community for a particular purpose, namely, to enjoy the security of their persons that is lacking in a state of nature. All political power then must know certain limits: It must not make the lives of citizens less secure than they would be—at the least—if there had not been a government in the first place.

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