Where Do Rights Come From?

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, political theorists argued that rights are given to human beings by nature or by God — an idea known as natural rights, derived from natural law. On this view, rights are not conferred by any ruler or society; we are born with them, and because of this they are inalienable — no one can legitimately take them away. Early theorists identified three basic natural rights — life, liberty, and property — and treated every other right as derived from these. The power of this idea lies in what it implies: that no state or organisation has the authority to strip away what nature itself has already given a person, which is exactly why natural-rights thinking became a tool for opposing arbitrary state power and for safeguarding individual freedom.

In recent decades, the language of 'human rights' has largely replaced the older language of 'natural rights', because the idea of a fixed natural law or a set of God-given norms is less widely accepted today. Instead, human rights are understood as guarantees that human beings themselves have worked out, collectively, as necessary for a minimally good life. The basic assumption behind human rights is that every person is entitled to certain things simply because they are human — every human being is unique and equally valuable, all persons are equal, and no one is born to serve another. Each of us, on this view, possesses an intrinsic value, which is why we must have equal opportunity to realise our full potential; this understanding is increasingly used to challenge inequalities based on race, caste, religion, and gender.

The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant gave this idea one of its deepest philosophical foundations, in what has come to be called the moral conception of rights. Kant argued that everything either has a price — meaning something else could be substituted for it as an equivalent — or a dignity, which admits of no equivalent and cannot be priced. Human beings, Kant said, unlike objects, possess dignity: every person has dignity and ought to be treated accordingly simply by virtue of being human, regardless of whether they are educated or uneducated, powerful or powerless, or even whether they have acted dishonestly — a person always retains some minimum dignity that must be respected. Kant's position rests on two arguments. First, we should treat others exactly as we would want to be treated ourselves. Second, we should never treat another person merely as a means to our own ends — we must not treat people the way we treat a pen, a car, or a horse (as things to be used), but must respect them because they are human beings, not because they happen to be useful to us. This idea became a rallying point for people struggling against social hierarchies and for human rights more broadly, and it underlies the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which builds on exactly this understanding of dignity to recognise claims that the world community sees as necessary for a life of dignity and self-respect. …