The concept of rights, and Locke's idea of natural rights

Introduction

The concept of rights is central to political theory because it ties ideas of dignity, liberty and justice to claims that can be made on the state. The second part of the question asks for the idea of natural rights advanced by John Locke.

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.

Kinds of rights

1. Political rights give citizens equality before law and the right to take part in the political process: to vote and elect representatives, contest elections, form or join parties. They are supplemented by civil liberties: a free and fair trial, free expression, protest and dissent. Together they are the basis of democratic government.
2. Economic and social rights secure the conditions for exercising political rights: food, shelter, clothing, health, a basic education and reasonable conditions of work. A person struggling on the pavement to meet basic needs gets little from the right to vote, so democracies increasingly provide housing, medical facilities, minimum wages and employment guarantees (in India, the rural employment guarantee scheme is NCERT's example).
3. Cultural rights include the right to primary education in one's mother tongue and to set up institutions teaching one's language and culture.

Some rights, to life, liberty, equal treatment and political participation, are seen as basic and must have priority; others are justified claims that are being recognised as societies develop. The list has grown as new threats appear: rights to clean air and water, sustainable development, and the rights of children.

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.

Conclusion

Rights are justified claims to the conditions of dignity, recognised in the constitution and protected by the state. Locke's idea of natural rights argued that government exists to protect rights. We now speak more of human rights, which rest on what every person needs as a human being rather than on a natural law, but the idea that the state exists for the individual and that rulers answer for how they use power survives.