Locke on 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.

Locke on natural rights

Where Locke stands. Locke belongs to the social contract tradition with Hobbes and Rousseau: these philosophers took liberty to mean the absence of constraints, and at the same time set out the framework of common rules within which each person's freedom was to be exercised. Like Hobbes and Rousseau, he started from a state of nature, the idea that Rawls later reworked as his original position. IGNOU calls him the father of liberalism.

Locke's argument. Life, liberty and property are natural rights, fixed by a natural law that is older than political society, and protecting them is both the aim and the justification of government. Government does this through a system of justice made possible by law, and citizens accept its authority because it guarantees them these rights. So rights are not a ruler's gift: following Locke, Jefferson argued that people hold rights apart from any that government gives, that they can form and dissolve governments, and that protecting rights is government's only legitimate purpose. The tenets IGNOU gives under Locke's name fit this: a rational person holds natural rights that no authority may cross, and civil society and the state are artificial bodies set up to serve the common interest. On law and liberty, he held that a commitment to liberty does not mean abolishing law: law should be confined to protecting each person's liberty from encroachment by others, and so understood it enlarges and defends liberty. The result is limited government under the rule of law, the core of classical liberalism. His influence runs into contemporary libertarian thought: Nozick, influenced by Locke, treats individuals' natural rights as limits on the state, so that redistributing property violates them.

Criticism. The idea of a natural law laid down by nature or God appears unacceptable today, which is why the language of human rights, resting on what every person needs simply as a human being for a minimally good life, has largely replaced that of natural rights. IGNOU adds a class criticism: Locke's line of thought protected the economic interests of the rising merchant-industrialist class and favoured giving political power to it.