Teleological Groundings of Rights and Duties

2019 ◽  
pp. 89-117
Author(s):  
Rowan Cruft
Keyword(s):  
Natural Rights ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
The Right

Chapter 7 develops a teleological account of the grounding of duties and rights. It argues that a ‘natural’ right—that is, a duty that is owed to someone independently of anyone’s recognizing or deciding that it is owed to them (i.e. a duty that bears Chapter 4’s ‘Addressive’ requirements independently of anyone recognizing this or creating it)—must be a duty grounded wholly or predominantly on the right-holder’s own good. By contrast, legal, conventional, and promissory rights need not be grounded or justified by the right-holder’s good. Many alternative accounts of the grounding of ‘natural’ rights—from e.g. Darwall, Kamm, Nagel, Ripstein, Scanlon—are considered and rejected.

Natural Rights as Powers to Act

2020 ◽  
pp. 102-120
Author(s):  
Susan James
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
The Right

Spinoza grounds his political philosophy on a highly counter-intuitive conception of natural right as the right to do anything in your power. Just as big fish eat little fish by the right of nature, so humans act by natural right, regardless of what they do. In this essay I explain what leads Spinoza to hold this view and show how, in doing so, he contentiously rejects some of the most central assumptions of the natural law tradition. Finally, I consider whether Spinoza’s view can contribute anything of value to current discussions of natural right. I argue that he draws our attention to prerequisites of a cooperative way of life that contemporary theorists frequently neglect.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Rowan Cruft
Keyword(s):  
Natural Rights ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The Right

The aim of the book—to offer a philosophical assessment of the concept of a right—is introduced, along with terminological distinctions. Chapter 1 defends the author’s Hohfeldian assumption that all claim-rights entail correlative duties owed to the right-holder. The chapter ends by clarifying the idea of a ‘natural’ right as simply a right that exists independently of anyone recognizing that it exists. So conceived, natural rights need imply neither a theistic nor a ‘state of nature’ grounding, and can include many rights protecting our sociality.

Rights to Punish for Libertarians

Dialogue ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 675-694
Author(s):  
Jordan Howard Sobel
Keyword(s):  
Natural Rights ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
Upper Limit ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
Equal Right

Thomas Hurka derives rights to punish from what I will term the Libertarian Rights Principle, which is “that there is really only one natural right, namely the equal right of all persons to the most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for other persons, and that all other natural rights are species or instances of the right to liberty.” These rights to punish, he says, (1) extend only to punishing violators of rights, never to “punishing” the innocent; (2) extend only to punishing for violations pursuant to intentions publicly announced prior to these violations; (3) are subject to the “upper limit qualification” (p. 652) that a permissible punishment for the violation of a right cannot be an act that would violate a more important right (i.e., a punishment that would infringe on a liberty more important than the one infringed upon in the violation); and (4) are subject to the “minimum necessary qualification” (p. 653) that a punishment p for violating a right r is not permissible if a punishment p' that would, were it permitted, violate a less important right than would p, would protect r as effectively as would p.

scholarly journals Philosophical and Legal Interpretation of Individualism in Philosophy of Montesquieu and Voltaire

2020 ◽  
pp. 337-345
Author(s):  
Pavlo PYLYPYSHYN
Keyword(s):  
Natural Rights ◽  
Natural State ◽  
Legal Interpretation ◽  
Citizenship Status ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Equal Citizenship ◽  
Legal Sense

The article attempts to find individualistic ideas in philosophy of Montesquieu and Voltaire, who continued to discourse on legal themes specific particularly to the Enlightenment: the theme of natural condition, social contract, rationalism, morality, human’s place in the world and God in a human. Revealing, first of all, the most topical issues of this time, the thinkers in their philosophy deal with the matters that are utterly individualistic. It is about: the idea of equality, freedom, natural rights (rights to life and ownership), human nature, etc. It is determined that Montesquieu and Voltaire, like other thinkers of the Enlightenment, revealed the essence of individualistic tendencies through rationalism, because human is a rational person who makes decisions, fights his desires supported by reason. The mind, as a source of law, allows man to develop on the basis of science, learnt by him patterns. It is defined that Montesquieu also discoursed on the individualist attributes; in particular, he pays attention to the problem of equality and freedom: 1) as thinker emphasizes, all were equal in natural state but afterwards this equality could be ensured only by the laws, which have to be just; 2) freedom in his philosophy is considered in two aspects: political and personal. For individualist issues important are revealing the personal aspect of freedom, which firstly was in safety of citizen. Providing this freedom is just laws and proper organization of statehood. It is studied that basic individualist principles of Voltaire are: 1) humanity, which lies in declaring the natural right of every person to life and to meet basic needs; 2) freedom manifests in that people become autonomous entities and are no longer formally dependent on one another; freedom lies in depending only on the laws; 3) people are equal and free to each other individuals, and equality is understood by him in just political and legal sense: acquiring equal citizenship status by all people, alike dependence of all citizens on the law and their equal protection by law; 4) ownership — freedom of labor, which is the right of every person «to sell his work to those who pay the highest price for it, as labor is the property of those who have no other ownerships.»

Giving It All Away? Thomas Reid’s Retreat from a Natural Rights Justification of Private Property

1993 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-389
Author(s):  
K.A.B. Mackinnon
Keyword(s):  
Private Property ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Sir Thomas More ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right

[P]roperty must exist wherever men exist, and…the right to such property is the necessary consequence of the natural right of men to life and liberty.Thomas Reid 1788I proceed therefore to consider in what State or Order of Society there is the least temptation to ill conduct, and I confess that to me the Utopian System of Sir Thomas More seems to have the advantage of all others in this respect. In that System, it is well known there is no private Property. All that which we call Property is under the Administration of the State for the common benefit of the whole political Family.Thomas Reid 1794The few remarks on property that are found in the Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind of the eighteenth century Scottish “Common Sense” philosopher, Thomas Reid, have led at least one commentator to treat him as a fairly traditional advocate of the natural right to (private) property, albeit one with a concern for the very poor. In an article on William Paley and the rights of the poor, Thomas Home remarks in passing that Reid’s (and Adam Ferguson's)major concern was to justify natural rights to property and that their interest in the poor was so little that a reader who accidentally skipped a paragraph or a page would miss all they had to say on the topic.

JUSTICE, EQUALITY, AND NATURAL RIGHTS CLAIMS: A RECONSIDERATION OF AQUINAS'S CONCEPTION OF RIGHT

2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 446-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Porter
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
Objective State ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right

AbstractAccording to a widely held view, Aquinas does not have a notion of subjective natural rights, understood as moral powers inhering in individuals. This article argues that this way of reading Aquinas is wrong, or at best, seriously misleading. Aquinas does identify the right, the object of justice, with the relation established between parties to an equitable exchange or interaction, and in this sense he identifies right with an objective state of affairs. But this line of analysis does not commit him to any particular construal of what constitutes a just relation. In particular, it leaves open the possibility that in some situations, the right, understood as an objectively equitable relation, presupposes that someone's claim of a right, is duly acknowledged. Moreover, in many contexts Aquinas says that individuals can claim certain liberties and immunities on the basis of some natural right, in terms that make it clear that these claims lie within the discretion of the individual. His overall conception of natural law and natural right implies that individuals can legitimately make certain claims by right, claims that emerge within some contexts and not others. He does not have a theory of rights, but neither do the scholastic jurists of the time, and his appeals to what someone can claim by right are reminiscent of their views. If they can be said to have a notion of subjective natural rights, the same can be said of Aquinas himself.

Beyond Strict Justice: Hugo Grotius on Punishment and Natural Right(s)

2014 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Seth Geddert
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right

AbstractHugo Grotius is often seen as reducing justice to the systematic protection of individual rights. However, this reading struggles to account for the surprisingly robust place he accords to punishment. An offender cannot plausibly claim punishment as a right, and the right to punish gives little direction about how best to carry out punishment. These difficulties point toward Grotius's little-noticed bifurcation of justice into “expletive” and “attributive” categories. While expletive (or “strict”) justice provides a grounding for the right to punish, its subsequent exercise must be governed by attributive justice. This higher justice considers persons and situations; requires imagination and prudential judgment; looks to the future; aims for the common good; acknowledges the importance of virtue; and never claims perfect solutions. Thus, Grotius's supposedly modern understanding of natural rights is best understood within an account of his specifically political thought—one that acknowledges an overarching framework of classical natural Right.

Recognizing Rights: Hobbes on the Authority of Mothers and Conquerors

2003 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-60
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Political Authority ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Maternal Authority ◽  
The Right ◽  
As If

This article follows Hobbes's distinction between man as the artificer of a commonwealth and man as the material of the commonwealth, by exploring the meaning of natural right and consent from the perspective of an artificer or potential sovereign. From this perspective, natural rights are transformed from alleged attributes of humans into decisions by a victor in war to treat the defeated as if they had natural rights. Similarly, consent is transformed from actions of subjects or citizens into a decision by a victor to recognize the defeated as if they had a right to consent and to treat them as if they had consented. Moreover, Hobbes's concept of a commonwealth by institution is understood as a definitional standard for the creation of commonwealths by force or acquisition, rather than as a possible historical event. Hobbes sought to explain and substantiate this view of natural right and consent by comparing the emergence of political authority from victory in war to the emergence of authority of a mother over her infant in a state of nature. According to Hobbes, just as maternal authority rests on a mother's recognition of the right of her infant to consent, political authority rests on the victor's recognition of the right of the defeated to consent. The practical policy thrust of Hobbes's thought emerges from his comparison of the authority of mothers and conquerors.

Are there Absolute Rights?

2020 ◽  
pp. 167-189
Author(s):  
Nigel Biggar
Keyword(s):  
Natural Rights ◽  
Moral Rights ◽  
Moral Duty ◽  
Moral Reasons ◽  
Good Sense ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
Per Se ◽  
The Right ◽  
Legal Right

During the discussion of natural rights-talk in Chapters 1 to 5, it was argued that claims to an absolute status do not survive scrutiny. Moreover, a main conclusion was that such rights-talk, trading on the legal paradigm’s connotations of stability and security, tends to obscure the conditionality of a putative natural right upon a range of moral considerations. Further, John Finnis’s absolute rights were judged to be either not natural, or too abstract and unspecified to be practically illuminating. This chapter returns to the topic, to consider whether, and how, it can make good sense to talk of absolute rights—that is, rights against kinds of action wrong per se, which must therefore be always granted and never suspended, regardless of the circumstances, especially the consequences. Since the right against torture is the paradigm of an absolute right, that is the focus here. The chapter concludes that there are kinds of action that are absolutely wrong by definition, and one of these is (sadistic, domineering, humiliating) ‘torture’. Therefore, there is a natural moral duty never to perform such an action. However, since there are no natural moral rights at all, there is no natural right against this. Nonetheless, there are good moral reasons of prudence why there should always be an absolute legal right against ‘torture’, so defined as to encompass all instances of non-consensual pain infliction, even though rare cases of the latter might be morally permissible. There is, therefore, at least one absolute legal right.

Natural Rights in Albert the Great

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mónica García-Salmones Rovira
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Careful Attention ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
Early Appearance ◽  
Albert The Great

Paying careful attention to his use of language, this chapter introduces Albert the Great’s contribution to natural rights into the scholarly debate between subjective and objective rights. Teacher of Thomas Aquinas, Albert’s work on ius naturale has been overshadowed in many aspects by the significance and impact of his student’s. However, Albert’s early appearance on the stage of empirical sciences as a student of nature has been widely recognized. Eclectic in his use of sources, Albert would generously use Stoic writings, and would become as well a first-rate commentator of Aristotle’s works. As a theologian, Albert’s Augustinian influences cannot be neglected. The text examined here, De bono (1242), constitutes an early and thorough elaboration of an original doctrine of natural right and, importantly, of natural rights.

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