Natural Rights

Comment on the Idea of Natural Rights. UPSC 2015 Paper 1A Qn1a

Rights, as social claims, create conditions necessary for the development of human personality.

The social contract theory proposed by contractualists like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and J. J. Rousseau holds the view that natural rights are not granted by the state, but they come from the very nature of man, his own intrinsic being. Natural rights were essential properties of men as men. The contractualists, therefore declared that the rights are inalienable, imprescriptible, and indefeasible.

If the state failed to maintain these rights, the man had the right to overthrow the government and set up a new government. For Locke, the rights are derived from the state of nature. They constitute the basis of the principles of governance. 

The teleological view of rights,  which seeks to relate the rights of man with the purpose of human life, says that the rights to liberty, property security, and resistance to oppression derive their sanction from natural rights 'pre-existing in the individual' and are the possessions of man in civil society. The concept of natural rights even served a source of inspiration for the American and French Revolutions.

Criticism -

  • According to some interpretations doctrine of natural rights was put forward to secure favorable conditions for a 'free market society'.
  • Natural rights interpretation depends on the nature and degree of the prevailing social consciousness.
  • Their character depends on the views and values of the class which grasps, interprets, and articulates them.

According to critiques like Laski and Bentham, rights as natural rights, are based on false assumptions that we can have rights and duties independently of society. The aspect of 'social claim' says that rights originate in society and, therefore, there are no rights prior to the society.

Laski perceives natural rights as a permanent and unchanging catalog of fundamental rights that are to be granted to people rather than as the limitations of civilized life.

 

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