Natural rights and legal rights

Based on Wikipedia: Natural rights and legal rights

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson made one of history's boldest claims: that certain rights are so fundamental they cannot be taken away by any government, any law, or any king. He called them "unalienable." But here's what's fascinating—Jefferson didn't invent this idea. He was drawing on a philosophical tradition stretching back over two thousand years, from ancient Greece through medieval Catholic monasteries to the coffeehouses of Enlightenment Europe.

And the debate he inherited remains unsettled today. Are there truly rights that exist independent of any legal system? Or, as the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham memorably put it, is the whole notion of natural rights "simple nonsense"?

Two Fundamentally Different Kinds of Rights

The distinction is straightforward but profound.

Legal rights are the ones you probably think of first. Your right to vote. Your right to a fair trial. Your right to own property. These exist because a government created them. They're written in constitutions, encoded in statutes, interpreted by courts. What the law gives, the law can take away. In one country you might have the legal right to own firearms; cross a border, and that right vanishes.

Natural rights are something else entirely. The philosophical tradition holds that these rights exist whether or not any government recognizes them. They belong to you simply because you're human. No legislature granted them. No court can revoke them. They are, in the language of the American Declaration of Independence, "endowed by their Creator"—though many philosophers who believe in natural rights don't rely on religious foundations at all.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, for instance, argued you could derive natural rights through pure reason alone, without any appeal to God or scripture.

The Ancient Roots

The Stoics of ancient Greece and Rome planted the seeds of this idea. They taught something radical for their time: that slavery was merely an external condition, a matter of circumstance, not nature. No person was born a slave in their essence.

The Roman philosopher Seneca captured this beautifully:

It is a mistake to imagine that slavery pervades a man's whole being; the better part of him is exempt from it: the body indeed is subjected and in the power of a master, but the mind is independent, and indeed is so free and wild, that it cannot be restrained even by this prison of the body, wherein it is confined.

Think about what a revolutionary claim this was in a society built on slavery. Seneca wasn't calling for abolition—he was a man of his time—but he was asserting something that would echo through the centuries: there is a part of every human being that cannot be owned.

The Stoics also introduced the idea of natural human equality. The historian A.J. Carlyle called this "the profoundest contribution of the Stoics to political thought." Before them, Aristotle had taught that some people were natural slaves, born to serve. The Stoics said no. Whatever your station in life, whatever chains bound your body, your inner self remained sovereign.

The Epicureans Had a Different Take

Not everyone in the ancient world approached rights the same way. The Epicureans—followers of the philosopher Epicurus—took what we might today call a contractarian view. They believed that in our natural state, we have certain freedoms, and we trade some of them for protection and social order.

Their Forty Principal Doctrines taught that "in order to obtain protection from other men, any means for attaining this end is a natural good." The rules we create aren't absolute; they should change with circumstances. This sounds remarkably modern—like the social contract theories that wouldn't fully develop for another two thousand years.

The key idea: humans in their natural state possess personal sovereignty. Any laws that govern them require their consent. And that consent can be revisited when conditions change.

From Ancient Philosophy to Medieval Theology

The early Christians picked up these threads and wove them into something new. Saint Paul alluded to natural law. Medieval Catholic philosophers—most famously Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century—developed elaborate theories about laws that existed above and beyond what any earthly ruler could decree.

But here's someone you've probably never heard of: Jean Gerson, a French theologian who in 1402 wrote a treatise called "De Vita Spirituali Animae"—"On the Spiritual Life of the Soul." Scholars consider this one of the first attempts to develop what we'd recognize as modern natural rights theory. Gerson was asking questions that still trouble us: What rights do humans have simply by virtue of being human? What can no authority legitimately take from them?

An Unlikely Courtroom Drama

In 1414, an extraordinary debate took place at the Council of Constance—a gathering of church leaders meant to resolve a crisis in the papacy. But something else happened there.

Paulus Vladimiri, the rector of Jagiellonian University in Poland, stood up to challenge the Teutonic Knights. This was a military order that had been waging crusades against the pagan Lithuanians for over a century, claiming religious authority to do so.

Vladimiri made an argument centuries ahead of its time: even infidels—non-believers—have rights that must be respected. Neither the Pope nor the Holy Roman Emperor had the authority to violate them. The Teutonic Knights could only wage defensive war, not aggressive conquest.

The Polish-Lithuanian delegation even brought Samogitian representatives—people from the region being conquered—to testify about the atrocities the Order had committed.

This wasn't an abstract philosophical debate. It was an international tribunal weighing claims about universal human rights, with victims present to give testimony. In 1414.

Luther and the Liberty of Conscience

A century later, Martin Luther would take the Stoic idea—that there's an inner part of us that cannot be enslaved—and transform it into a foundational Protestant principle: liberty of conscience.

In 1523, Luther wrote something that would reshape Western civilization:

Every man is responsible for his own faith, and he must see it for himself that he believes rightly. As little as another can go to hell or heaven for me, so little can he believe or disbelieve for me... Since belief or unbelief is a matter of everyone's conscience, and since this is no lessening of the secular power, the latter should be content and attend to its own affairs and permit men to believe one thing or another.

This was dynamite. Luther was saying that in matters of faith, no external authority—not the Church, not the state—has jurisdiction. Your conscience belongs to you alone.

From this seed would grow ideas about religious tolerance, freedom of thought, and limits on government power that we now consider foundational to liberal democracy.

John Locke and the Social Contract

By the seventeenth century, English philosopher John Locke synthesized these traditions into the theory that would most directly influence the American founders. He identified natural rights as "life, liberty, and estate"—estate meaning property.

Locke's crucial move was arguing that these fundamental rights could not be surrendered in the social contract. When people form governments, they give up some freedoms in exchange for protection and order. But certain rights remain beyond negotiation.

This was a direct challenge to the divine right of kings. Monarchs had claimed their authority came from God, unquestionable and absolute. Locke said no—government authority comes from the consent of the governed, and that consent has limits. Violate the natural rights of the people, and they have the right to rebel.

Alienable Versus Unalienable

Here we encounter a subtle but important distinction. Not all rights are created equal.

Some rights can be transferred or given up. You can sell your property. You can waive your right to remain silent. These are alienable rights—you can alienate yourself from them.

But can you sell yourself into slavery? Can you sign a contract giving up your freedom forever? Can you surrender your right to think for yourself?

The Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson, writing in 1725, said no. Some rights are unalienable—you cannot give them up even if you want to. Not because it's illegal, but because it's impossible. You cannot actually surrender your capacity for private judgment. You can promise to obey, you can pretend to believe, but your inner conscience remains your own.

Hutcheson wrote: "No man can really change his sentiments, judgments, and inward affections, at the pleasure of another... The right of private judgment is therefore unalienable."

This wasn't just philosophy—it had immediate political implications. If you cannot alienate your right to self-determination, then any contract claiming to do so is void from the start. This became a powerful argument against slavery and against absolute monarchy.

The German Philosopher Who Made It Systematic

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, writing in the early nineteenth century, developed this argument further. He distinguished between persons and things. A thing—a piece of furniture, a tract of land—can be transferred from one owner to another. That's what makes it property.

But the qualities that make you a person? Those cannot be transferred.

The right to what is in essence inalienable is imprescriptible, since the act whereby I take possession of my personality, of my substantive essence, and make myself a responsible being, capable of possessing rights and with a moral and religious life, takes away from these characteristics of mine just that externality which alone made them capable of passing into the possession of someone else.

In plainer terms: you cannot give away your personhood because the very act of giving it away would require the personhood you're trying to surrender. It's not just wrong—it's logically impossible.

The Debate Over American Independence

All these philosophical threads converged when Thomas Jefferson sat down to write the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Jefferson famously wrote that "all men are created equal" and "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," among them "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Notice what he did there. John Locke had listed "life, liberty, and property." Jefferson substituted "pursuit of happiness." Why?

Scholars still debate this. Perhaps Jefferson worried that protecting property as an unalienable right would make it harder to abolish slavery—since enslaved people were legally classified as property. Perhaps he simply thought happiness better captured what liberty was for.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Welsh minister Richard Price was making the same arguments. King George III, Price wrote, was "attempting to rob them of that liberty to which every member of society and all civil communities have a natural and unalienable title."

Price went further: any social contract that claims to surrender these rights is simply void. You cannot sign away your personhood any more than you can sign away your capacity to think. The colonists weren't just resisting bad policy—they were refusing to recognize contracts they had never legitimately made.

An Ancient Persian Parallel

The idea that rulers must earn their authority isn't unique to Western philosophy. Journalist Stephen Kinzer, writing about Iran, notes that Zoroastrian religion taught something remarkably similar thousands of years ago:

Citizens have an inalienable right to enlightened leadership and the duty of subjects is not simply to obey wise kings but also to rise up against those who are wicked. Leaders are seen as representative of God on earth, but they deserve allegiance only as long as they have farr, a kind of divine blessing that they must earn by moral behavior.

This concept of "farr"—divine legitimacy that must be continuously earned—echoes the European idea that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Lose that legitimacy, and the people have not just the right but the duty to resist.

From Natural Rights to Human Rights

After the horrors of World War II, the international community attempted something unprecedented: a universal declaration of the rights belonging to all humans everywhere. The 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights drew heavily on natural rights philosophy.

But there's an important distinction. Natural rights were traditionally conceived as negative rights—things the government must not do to you. Don't kill me. Don't imprison me without cause. Don't steal my property.

Human rights, as conceived in modern international law, also include positive rights—things you're entitled to receive. Education. Healthcare. A minimum standard of living.

This expansion remains controversial. Critics argue that positive rights require someone else to provide them, which necessarily infringes on others' liberty. How can you have a right to healthcare if that implies forcing doctors to provide it?

Defenders respond that negative rights are meaningless without positive support. What good is a right to life if you're starving? What good is liberty of conscience if you can't read?

The Skeptics Have a Point

Not everyone accepts that natural rights exist at all.

Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, dismissed the concept as "simple nonsense upon stilts." Rights, Bentham argued, are created by law. To speak of rights that exist before and independent of law is to speak of nothing at all.

There's also the problem of justification. Where exactly do natural rights come from? If you say God granted them, you've excluded everyone who doesn't believe in your God. If you say reason demonstrates them, you need to explain why equally rational people disagree about what they are. If you say they're self-evident, well—a lot of things that seemed self-evident turned out to be false.

And the lists of natural rights have varied wildly. Locke emphasized property. Jefferson substituted happiness. Some include rights to privacy, or to bear arms, or to healthcare, that others consider invented. If natural rights are universal and objective, why can't we agree on what they are?

Why It Matters Today

These aren't just philosophical puzzles for academics. They shape real debates about real policies.

When the Chinese government restricts speech or imprisons dissidents, Western governments invoke human rights—but China responds that these are Western values being imposed on other cultures. Are they? Or do these rights truly belong to all humans regardless of cultural context?

When courts debate whether corporations have religious liberty or whether hate speech should be protected, they're wrestling with questions about where rights come from and what limits them.

When activists argue that healthcare or housing should be rights, not privileges, they're asking us to expand the list—and critics ask on what authority.

The Stoic insight—that there's something in every human being that cannot legitimately be owned or controlled by another—remains as radical and contested as it was two thousand years ago. We're still working out its implications. Perhaps we always will be.

The Unfinished Argument

Here's what's remarkable: after millennia of debate, involving some of history's greatest minds, the fundamental questions remain unresolved.

Do natural rights exist? If so, what are they? Where do they come from? How do we know we've identified them correctly?

Some philosophers have given up on the concept entirely, arguing that we should focus on what legal rights we want to create rather than pretending to discover rights that were there all along.

Others insist that without natural rights, there's no basis for judging any law unjust. If legal rights are all that exist, then Nazi Germany violated no rights—it simply had different laws. For many, that conclusion is unacceptable. There must be a standard above the positive law by which we can condemn atrocities.

The tension between these views shows no sign of resolution. But perhaps that's fitting. The questions at stake—What do we owe each other? What can no authority rightfully take from us? What does it mean to be human?—are not the kind that get settled once and for all. Each generation must answer them anew.

Two thousand years after the Stoics, three centuries after Locke, we're still holding these truths—and still debating whether they're self-evident at all.