From natural and human rights to Bentham's 'nonsense upon stilts' — the disputed foundations of what individuals may demand of others.
What are rights — natural facts about persons, useful legal fictions, or claims we make good only by winning them?
The language of rights is the common currency of modern moral and political argument, yet its foundations are fiercely contested. Are rights grounded in nature or God, so that they exist prior to any government and set limits it may not cross? Or are they, as the sceptics insist, merely the creatures of positive law — with talk of 'natural rights' a rhetorical inflation of mere desires? Between these poles lie theories that root rights in human dignity, in the protection of interests, or in the recognition won through political struggle. Analytical philosophers add precision, distinguishing claims, liberties, powers and immunities. To trace these positions is to watch a single, world-changing idea being built, attacked, and rebuilt.
Natural law
A right is a moral quality attached to a person, a faculty of doing or having something justly, discoverable by reason and binding even 'if we should concede that there is no God'. By grounding subjective rights in a secular natural law, he laid the foundation of modern rights theory and of the law of nations.
On the Law of War and Peace (1625).
Social contract
The fundamental 'right of nature' is the liberty each has to use his own power to preserve his own life, which in the state of nature extends to everything. He sharply separates right (liberty) from law (obligation): to escape war, individuals lay down most of this natural right by covenant, retaining only the inalienable right to resist deadly force.
Leviathan (1651), chs. 14–15.
Classical liberalism
All persons possess natural rights to life, liberty and property, given by the law of nature and existing before government. These rights are inalienable and set the purpose and limits of political authority: a government instituted to protect them forfeits its legitimacy if it systematically violates them, justifying resistance.
Second Treatise of Government (1689).
Enlightenment feminism
The rights of man proclaimed by the age must extend to women, who share the same rational nature and are entitled to the same civil and political standing. To deny women rights while celebrating the rights of man is an inconsistency that reduces half of humanity to dependence and corrupts society as a whole.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
Conservatism
Abstract 'rights of man' proclaimed by revolutionaries are metaphysical fictions that dissolve the real, inherited rights of Englishmen — concrete liberties handed down as a patrimony through custom, prescription and prudence. Genuine rights are historical and social, not deduced from reason; tearing up the social fabric in their name invites tyranny.
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
Radical Enlightenment liberalism
Against Burke he insists that natural rights are the inalienable birthright of every generation, which no ancestral compact can bind. Civil rights are natural rights exchanged for the security of society; a legitimate government exists only to secure them, and each generation has the right to remake its own constitution.
Rights of Man (1791–1792).
Utilitarianism
Natural and imprescriptible rights are 'nonsense upon stilts': a right is the child of law, and there are no rights anterior to positive legislation. Talk of natural rights is at best rhetoric and at worst an incitement to disorder; rights should be created and justified only by their tendency to promote the greatest happiness.
Anarchical Fallacies (1796).
German idealism / critical philosophy
There is a single innate right — freedom, understood as independence from being constrained by another's choice, insofar as it can coexist with the like freedom of all under universal law. Grounded in the dignity of persons as ends in themselves, right concerns the outer form of free coexistence, and the state's coercive laws are justified only as securing this reciprocal freedom.
The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), 'Doctrine of Right'.
German idealism
Abstract right — the sphere of persons, property and contract — is only the first, most formal moment of freedom, which must be completed in morality and in the concrete ethical life of family, civil society and state. Rights are real not as isolated claims but as embedded in institutions that give the free will an objective, rational existence.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820).
Historical materialism
The celebrated 'rights of man' are the rights of the egoistic individual of bourgeois society, separated from others: liberty as the right to private property, security as the guarantee of that egoism. Such rights presuppose and entrench the very alienation they claim to overcome; true human emancipation lies beyond the standpoint of individual right.
On the Jewish Question (1843).
Analytic jurisprudence
The loose word 'right' actually conceals four distinct jural relations — claim-right (with its correlative duty), privilege/liberty, power, and immunity — each with its own opposite and correlative. This analytical scheme dispels confusion by showing precisely what a given right entails and against whom, and it remains foundational to modern legal theory.
Fundamental Legal Conceptions (1913, 1917).
Liberal legal philosophy
Rights are 'trumps' held by individuals against collective goals: they mark out interests so important that they cannot be overridden merely because doing so would increase overall welfare. Grounded in the right to equal concern and respect, they impose limits on what a majority may do to a person even in the name of the general good.
Taking Rights Seriously (1977).