Human Rights as Natural Rights

Abstract

1. There are subtle differences in emphasis, however, between each of the major formulations, human rights, natural rights and the rights of man, and each has advantages and disadvantages. Natural rights stresses a grounding in human nature. It also refers to a tradition of thought which includes Locke, Paine, and Jefferson among its most prominent exponents and suggests a connection with the older idea of natural law. Such resonances add richness to the idea, but also may be a burden, for example, as is the case in the Lockean tradition's concentration on civil and political rights alone or the vague and confusing reference to natural law. Furthermore, the endowment of man with rights by nature is at best an obscure process. The phrase rights of man suggests man as the source of rights. To the extent that man is viewed as not merely natural, but rational and moral, this suggests a more complicated, and probably more illuminating, source for these rights. However, this phrase, particularly in English (although not necessarily in the French droits de I'homme), has deeply rooted ideological connotations from the era of the French Revolution. It also has regrettable, even if easily exaggerated, sexist connotations. Human rights seems to avoid the disadvantages of the other two terms. Like the rights of man, it suggests a subtle and particularly interesting derivation of rights from the complex moral notion of humanity; human nature as the source of the rights. However, the character of this derivation is rarely made explicit enough to be considered as anything more than suggestive. In addition, human rights may misleadingly suggest that all the rights held by human beings are human rights. Paine falls into this confusion, for example, in attacking Burke. See The Collected Works of Thomas Paine, edited by Philip S Foner, New York: The Citadel Press, 1945, vol. 1, p. 273. Instead, human rights are a particular type of rights held by human beings, the rights they hold simply by their nature as human persons. Furthermore, human rights may misleadingly suggest that one is being humane, charitable or beneficent in establishing or recognizing such rights, when in fact one is giving to rightholders that to which they are entitled. However,