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One NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL RIGHTS Howard P. Kainz First, I want to discuss some terms. "Natural rights" and "human rights" are closely related but not synonyms. Natural rights are connected with natural law theory and encompass human rights. If something is considered a natural right, it is also a human right. Not every proponent of human rights subscribes to natural law theory, however. From this perspective, it is false to say that if something is a human right, it is also a natural right. Although we expect a broad convergence of rights agreed on from both perspectives, divergences may occur. Also, "natural rights" should be distinguished from "natural law." The confusions between them are traditional and long-standing. lusin Latin can mean either "right" or "law." This ambiguity led the medieval jurists to make a distinction between objective ius and subjective ius (law and right).1 Perhaps the same ambiguity helped transform the historical emphasis from law to rights, without the change being noticeable. In German, das Recht has a similar double meaning, leading to hesitation among translators as to whether Hegel's Philosophic des Rechts should be translated as Philosophy of Right or Philosophy of Law. The case is similar to le droit in French, el derecho in Spanish, and lo diritto in Italian. So we are faced with at least one situation where Anglophones might claim that their language is more precise philosophically than other languages! But the ambiguities are not just semantic, they are also conceptual. Many philosophers associate "natural law" with "state of nature" theories, which are primarily concerned with the elucidation of basic rights. However, we should remember that even classical theorists like Hobbes and Locke discuss natural law as well as natural right. Natural law addresses fundamental moral duties, natural right (and rights) concern fundamental moral claims or entitlements. John Finnis in Natural Law and Natural Rights develops a precise legal definition: We may safely speak of rights wherever a basic principle or requirement of practical reasonableness, or a rule derived therefrom, gives to A, and to each and every other member of a class to which A belongs, the benefit of (i) a positive or negative requirement (obligation) imposed upon B (including, inter alia, any requirement not to interfere with A's activity or with A's enjoyment of some other form of good) or of (ii) the ability to bring it about that B is subject to such a requirement, or of (iii) the immunity from being himself subjected by B to any such requirement.2 20 Howard P. Kainz Natural law and natural right are correlative; neither can exist without the other. In social relationships, the existence of a right implies a corresponding duty, and a strict duty in a social context implies that someone has a right. In philosophy, natural rights are connected with individuality and personhood. Natural law, however, is associated with sociality andcommunality - theproper relationship between individuals, possibly in a top-down configuration, sometimes horizontally. Natural rights are implicit in a natural law theory, but explicit attention to natural rights has evolved slowly. One hears of dubious and strained ascriptions of natural rights theory to Plato and Aristotle, but we should focus on the Stoics for definite statements about natural rights. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus writes, "Even the slave is deserving our esteem and able to claim from us his rights"3 - a far-reaching insight coming from the second century A.D. Aquinas, however, does not present a theory of rights in the modern sense. Im for Aquinas is Aristotelian justice, the virtuous maintenance of equitable relationships concerning property among individuals. He says nothing about the right to political liberty or equality, or even to life or happiness. The modern notion of natural/human rights came into the limelight with the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), which asserted that liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression were the "imprescriptible natural rights" of all human beings. They are "imprescriptible" because no political power or legislature could grant them or take them away. Earlier, American founders like Jefferson, working in the context of Lockean natural law theory, grappled with the problem of coordinating natural law with the rights of subjectivity. Spelling out these rights, the American Declaration of Independence (1776), thirteen years before the French Declaration, opens by emphasizing the basic rights of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." For us in the twenty-first century, the major impetus to a...

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