Rights, with the concept of natural rights

Introduction

Rights are among the most important ideas in modern politics. The question asks for their meaning and, briefly, for the concept of natural rights, the basis that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theorists gave them.

Meaning and importance of rights

A right is an entitlement or a justified claim: what we may rightly claim as citizens, as individuals and simply as human beings, something that the rest of society must recognise as legitimate. Not everything that I want is a right; rights are those claims that I and others regard as necessary for a life of respect and dignity. They are claimed on two grounds, that they are conditions of dignity and self-respect (the right to livelihood, freedom of expression), and that they are necessary for well-being and the development of talents (the right to education). A claim that is injurious to others or to oneself, such as smoking or taking banned drugs, cannot be claimed as a right. Rights are claimed chiefly against the state: each right says what the state must do and what it must refrain from doing, so that rights place limits on the state's authority and make rulers accountable, for the state exists for the sake of the individual and not the reverse.

Natural rights

Meaning. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries political theorists traced rights to nature or to God, by way of natural law. A natural right is therefore not a gift of any ruler or society: each person is born with it, it is inalienable, and no one may take it away. Three such rights were named, to life, to liberty and to property, and every other right was treated as derived from these three.

Significance. If rights come before the state, then no state or organisation may remove what the law of nature has given. That is why the idea was so widely used to resist arbitrary power by states and governments and to protect individual freedom. It gave rights a moral basis that does not depend on legal recognition: NCERT notes that several theorists define rights as claims the state recognises, but that legal endorsement, though it gives a right special status, is not the ground on which rights are claimed. The idea also lives on in contemporary theory. Robert Nozick, influenced by Locke, holds that individuals have natural rights which limit the state: redistributing property to make holdings fairer violates them, and even coercing people without their consent to keep minimal public order is hard to justify.

Criticism. The weak point is the foundation. Today the idea of a natural law, a set of norms laid down by nature or God, is widely found unacceptable, and the term human rights is now used more often than natural rights. Rights are seen instead as guarantees that human beings themselves seek in order to lead a minimally good life, on the assumption that every person, simply by being human, is unique and of equal value, so that no one is born to serve another. A fixed list given by nature also sits uneasily with the way rights have in fact been expanded and reinterpreted over time to take in groups once excluded.

Conclusion

Rights are justified claims necessary for a life of dignity. The idea of natural rights gave them a moral foundation independent of rulers and is the ancestor of modern human rights, though today we speak of human rights because the idea of natural law is less acceptable.