Relation to others· Power and justice
Natural rights
Axis: Nature of rights — Where do rights come from?
Rights are inherent in the person, prior to the state and to positive law: they are discovered, not granted. A law that violates them is unjust, even if perfectly legal.
Movements 2
The Enlightenmentexplicit
Prior to all society and all positive law, man possesses as his own, by the mere fact of his rational nature, rights that no power has conferred and that none may legitimately abolish: to life, to liberty, to the property of his own person. makes them the measure of every government, instituted only to secure them. These rights are universal because they flow from a common humanity, not from the privileges of an order or a birth: this is the weapon against absolutism and the society of estates, which the Declaration of 1789 will inscribe into law, « men are born and remain free and equal in rights ». , from within the century, will nonetheless object that a right without positive law is mere « nonsense upon stilts ».
Locke, Two Treatises of Government, II · Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789)
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Liberalisminferable
All its variants agree that there exist rights which limit power and which no majority may abolish at will; they diverge on their grounding, which spreads the current across several paths: prior to the state in , guarantees justified by their in , terms of fair cooperation through deliberation in . The shared refusal is of pure positivism, for which there is no right but what authority decrees.
Locke, Two Treatises of Government · Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)
Philosophers 3
Lockeexplicit
The state of nature is no licence: it is governed by a law of nature that reason discovers. Since all men are the workmanship of one Maker, sent into the world by his order and about his business, none has the right to destroy another or to put him under his absolute power. From this original equality Locke derives, not a mere duty not to harm, but correlative subjective rights, to life, liberty and estate, that each bears prior to any government. Power is therefore legitimate only to secure them; to violate them makes it tyrannical. These "unalienable rights" would pass almost word for word into the American Declaration of Independence.
Second Treatise of Government, II-V
Kantexplicit
Right is derived a priori from reason, not from utility nor from positive law alone: every human being possesses, by virtue of their humanity, an innate right to freedom, grounded in the dignity of the person as an end in itself. A rational version of natural rights.
The Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Right
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Thomas Aquinasinferable
The Thomist doctrine of is the medieval ancestor of natural rights: there is a just that does not depend on the legislator's will but on the nature ordered by God, and human law only determines or applies this prior norm. Positive law derives its validity from its conformity to natural law; it is not held to be a sheer creation of the sovereign, which places Thomas on the side of natural rights against the legal positivism to come.
Summa Theologiae, Ia-IIae, q. 95, a. 2