Natural Rights
Natural rights are rightful claims inherent in every human being by nature, prior to and independent of government.
A right is a rightful claim. If something rightfully belongs to you, you have a claim against others who would wrongfully take or interfere with it.
Natural rights are the most fundamental such claims because they do not originate in government, legislation, custom, or social convention. They belong to human beings by nature; they are inseparable from human nature.
The Declaration of Independence states that all human beings are created equal and “endowed” with “certain unalienable Rights,” among them “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Government is then said to be instituted to secure these rights. The sequence matters: the rights exist before government; government is created for their protection.
Natural Rights Belong to Human Beings
Natural rights belong to each individual by virtue of being human. If rights are truly natural, and every human being shares the same human nature, it follows that every human being possesses the same and equal fundamental natural rights.
The natural rights of a particular person therefore do not depend upon race, sex, ancestry, wealth, social class, nationality, religious belief, or any other group membership.
As all human beings are equally human, no human being naturally possesses more, fewer, or different fundamental rights than anyone else.
Human beings differ enormously in intelligence, strength, beauty, wealth, talent, ambition, virtue, and countless other characteristics. But those differences do not make one person more human than another.
No person therefore possesses a natural right to another person’s life, liberty, labor, or property merely because he is stronger, wealthier, more intelligent, politically powerful, or born into a particular family or group.
John Locke makes the connection explicit: because human beings are “equal and independent,” “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”
Rights and Duties
Natural rights imply corresponding duties. If I possess a natural right to my life, other people have a natural duty not to murder me. If I possess a natural right to liberty, others may not rightfully enslave me. If something is rightfully my property, others may not rightfully steal it because they want it.
The principle is reciprocal.
I cannot invoke my own liberty as a justification for violating yours. Natural liberty is therefore not license to do whatever one desires. Equal natural rights place moral limits upon everyone. This is why the same natural-law principle that protects my rights also requires me to respect yours.
Natural Rights Are Prior to Government
Government does not create natural rights. Legislatures can create legal rights, benefits, offices, procedures, and privileges. Constitutions and laws can give legal form and protection to preexisting natural rights. But within the natural-rights tradition, government does not make human beings possess rightful claims to their lives and liberty merely by declaring that they do.
An extreme example illustrates the principle: Even when shipwrecked and stranded on a deserted island with a few other people—and no government exists—you still have a natural, rightful claim to your own life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Should a government be created, natural rights provide the standard by which that government (and all other governments) should be judged.
According to the Declaration of Independence, government is legitimate insofar as it helps secure the natural rights that citizens possessed prior to and independent of government. When government becomes destructive of those ends and violates rather than protects natural rights, the Declaration says the people retain a right to alter or abolish it.
Unalienable Rights
The Declaration describes natural rights as unalienable. To alienate something is to transfer it from one person to another. Many particular possessions are alienable. You may sell your house, give away a book, or exchange money for something else.
But selling a particular piece of property does not mean selling your natural right to acquire, possess, use, and dispose of property altogether.
The same distinction helps explain unalienable natural rights.
Suppose someone steals your wallet. The thief may possess the physical wallet, but theft does not make him its rightful owner. Your property has been taken; your rightful claim has not disappeared. Indeed, the continuing existence of your rightful claim is precisely what makes the theft wrong.
Likewise, a murderer can take another person’s life, but he cannot make the victim’s natural right to life never to have existed. A tyrant can imprison someone unjustly, but imprisonment does not transform the violation into a rightful act.
Natural rights can be violated without being morally erased.
This does not mean every restriction upon life or liberty is necessarily unjust. Self-defense, punishment for wrongdoing, and other exercises of lawful force raise questions of justice. Natural rights exist within a moral order; they are not permissions to violate the equal rights of others.
Natural Rights and Civil Rights
Natural rights should also be distinguished from civil rights. Natural rights belong to human beings by nature. Civil rights take legal form within a political community through constitutions, statutes, courts, and other institutions.
A legal title protects property. Contract law helps secure voluntary agreements. Courts provide remedies when rights are violated. Protections for speech and religious exercise give legal security to important forms of liberty.
Civil rights therefore can help secure natural rights without being identical to them.
That distinction matters because government can fail in two different ways: it can fail to protect a natural right, or it can itself violate one.
Why Natural Rights Matter
Natural rights establish a moral standard that applies equally to ruler and ruled. They explain why government actions can be wrong even when officials claim legal authority for them. Much of the controversy preceding the American Revolution concerned precisely this question: Were acts of Parliament and the Crown rightful merely because British authorities enacted or enforced them? The Americans argued that governmental power itself was subject to higher standards of constitutional authority and ultimately natural right.
The Virginia Declaration of Rights stated the principle just before the Declaration of Independence: human beings are “by nature equally free and independent” and possess inherent rights including life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
Natural rights therefore connect human nature, equality, liberty, justice, consent, and the proper purpose of government. Government does not give human beings their natural rights. Human beings create government so that rights they already possess by nature may be more securely protected.
