Where did the idea of natural rights come from?

Natural rights developed from the older idea of natural law, which was a set of principles governing proper human conduct, usually thought to be God-given rather than humanly constructed. That idea first developed in Stoic thinking in the third century BC. The idea of rights held by individuals came much later, and historians do not agree on exactly when or by whom it was first formulated. [1]

One survey argues that natural rights were arguably recognized in nascent form by Aristotle in the fourth century BC, who held that citizens who are equal by nature have the same natural right, meaning a just claim, to political office. Natural law was also developed by medieval thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, who died in 1274, and it was thought to embody principles of right and wrong in relations between individuals. [2] [3]

The historian Brian Tierney, in the essay from which the first source is drawn, says there is no agreement about early origins. Some scholars favor Hobbes as originator, some Grotius, some Gerson. He describes the most widely accepted view as locating the first concept of subjective natural rights in the nominalist philosophy of the late Middle Ages, a case presented most fully by Michel Villey. Villey held that William of Ockham made a radical innovation, a hybrid monster, by defining ius (right) as a subjective power. The Routledge Encyclopedia similarly cites recent scholarship (Tuck 1979) suggesting that natural rights first emerged in fourteenth-century Europe, and that they were most popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. [4] [1]

Tierney argues for an earlier date. He points out that medieval canonists used the language of right as power for more than a century before Ockham. One canonist writing just before 1200 said of bishops-elect, "They have a power of administering, that is a right." Tierney therefore places the key shift in twelfth-century jurisprudence. [4]

In Tierney's account, a revival of legal study around Bologna produced Gratian's Decretum (c. 1140), a codification of church law. Its opening chapters used the term ius naturale in several seemingly inconsistent ways. For example, Gratian wrote that by natural law all property was common, and also that any human law contrary to natural law was void. Commentators such as Huguccio (c. 1190) sorted out these meanings, and in doing so they added a new one: natural right as a power or faculty inhering in human persons. At first this meant mainly the ability, rooted in reason and free will, to discern and do what is right. Soon canonists drew specific rights from it, the first being a right of the destitute poor to the necessities of life, even if that meant taking the surplus property of the rich. [4]

Ockham later drew on this canonist argument in the Franciscan poverty dispute that began in 1328. He argued that the friars could use things justly because there was a natural right to use external things, common to all and necessary to sustain life, which no one could renounce. [4]

In the early modern era, Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf advanced natural rights theories. The most influential figure was John Locke, whose Second Treatise held that in a state of nature people possessed rights to life, liberty and estate under a law of nature that taught that no one ought to harm another in life, health, liberty or possessions. Tierney also notes that the European encounter with America prompted a debate among Spanish scholars, including Vitoria, Las Casas and Sepulveda, about the rights of American Indians. [2] [4]