The Moral Conservatism of Natural Rights

Abstract

The notion of rights is commonly seen as the core of modern political individualism. The idea that it is as bearers of rights that people lend legitimacy to and seek protection from political authority is taken to be the legacy of a chequered history of political theory and practice. In this history Protestant natural lawyers played a significant early role and, consequently, it is to these thinkers that one is often led when searching for the origins of the idea of rights. However, I want to suggest, not for the first time, that it is a misconception of early modern natural law to think that one of its prominent features was to be based on a theoretically significant theory of individual rights. While all natural lawyers operated with a notion of rights, and while there were politically important invocations of rights, the systems of Protestant natural law from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries made the concept of rights theoretically subordinate, not foundational, and, in general, politically impotent. The reason for this is that these rights theories harboured a deep-seated moral conservatism.