Natural rights (short note)

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.