Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Hill Green on Natural Rights

1999 ◽  
pp. 42-58
Author(s):  
Beth J. Singer
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Common Good ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Classical Sense

This chapter discusses three modern philosophers whose views run counter to the established tradition of “natural rights”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Hill Green. While they all reject the concept of “natural rights” in the classical sense, Rousseau, Mill, and Green have given theories of rights that are naturalistic, in the sense that they are grounded in these philosophers' respective analyses of empirically observable human behavior and motivation. According to Rousseau, rights neither are innate nor belong to individuals prior to or outside the framework of society. For Mill, rights are products of empirically discoverable psychological tendencies, including the interest of all in protection by society. Meanwhile, Green argues that for rights to exist is for people not only to conceive them, but also to understand them to serve a common good that each conceives as his own and that each therefore acts to promote.

Development within the limits of order, 1820–70

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Toye
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Common ◽  
State List ◽  
The French Revolution

After the upheavals of the French Revolution, Enlightenment thinkers were blamed for loosening the bonds of society. In nineteenth-century France, Saint-Simon advocated a social compromise whereby scientists and artists planned the path of progress while the propertied classes retained political power albeit acting as trustees for the interests of the poor. Comte called for a scientific sociology to inform the design of political institutions. In Britain, Bentham rejected the doctrine of natural rights in favour of the principle of utility, while J. S. Mill flirted with Comte’s positivism briefly. Marx made little impact and socialism came in the guise of Fabianism and middle-class trusteeship for the poor. In Germany, Hegel interpreted the French Revolution as a phase in a moral struggle for freedom and called for freedom to be reconciled with the idea of the common good embodied in the state. List envisaged the common good as protectionist trade policy.

Are there Natural Rights? The Sceptical Critique and the Modern Roman Catholic Tradition

2020 ◽  
pp. 74-92
Author(s):  
Nigel Biggar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Jacques Maritain ◽  
Positive Rights ◽  
Rerum Novarum ◽  
The Common ◽  
John Finnis ◽  
Catholic Tradition

This chapter examines the modern Roman Catholic appropriation of rights-talk, in order to see whether or not Catholic tradition has proven better than other ‘modern’ traditions at meeting the sceptics’ objections to natural rights. It focuses particularly on Rerum Novarum, Jacques Maritain, ‘Pacem in Terris’, and John Finnis and, in passing, it criticises Samuel Moyn’s construal of twentieth-century Catholic thought on rights. It concludes that, through its affirmation of a larger moral order (‘natural law’), Catholic thinking about rights has shown itself more ready to talk in terms of moral categories other than ‘rights’. It is also unusual in the prominence it gives to the concept of the common good, although typically without offering any exact explanation of how this relates to individual rights—except in the case of John Finnis. Finnis also identifies a common problem with much other ‘modern’ rights-talk: that, since the very concept of a right has an absolute, ‘conclusory’ force, rights-talk has the logical tendency to shut down wider deliberation about justice. Instead, he argues, rights should emerge at the end of deliberation about a range of factors—moral, social, and political—rather than be invoked at the beginning. This appears to affirm socially contingent positive rights rather than absolute natural ones. But that is not the whole story, because the Catholic rights tradition consistently asserts some absolute natural rights. These, however, are either tautologous or practically unilluminating.

The Common Good and a Teleological Conception of Rights

Theoria ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (157) ◽  
pp. 100-122
Author(s):  
Sabelo Ndwandwe
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Social Recognition ◽  
African Philosophy ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Normative Significance ◽  
The Common ◽  
Rights Discourse

A common communitarian criticism of rights discourse picks at the individualistic picture of rights which is said to presuppose a society where persons are conscious of their separateness. In contrast, an African communitarian society is said to put less emphasis on individual interests; it encourages harmony, not divergence of interests, competition, and conflict. Thus, preoccupation with rights would be incompatible with and even hostile to the possibility of community. This article argues the opposite; it submits that rights and community are mutually constitutive. To this end, I explore T. H. Green’s social recognition thesis which reconceptualises rights and obligations in a teleological framework. When conceived in this fashion, rights transcend antithetical relations between individuals and society as typified by classical natural rights thinkers. I argue that, considering a normative significance of the common good, a compelling account of rights in African philosophy is better conceived in a teleological framework.

Natural Rights or Political Prudence? Francis Hutcheson on Toleration

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Knud Haakonssen
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Political Control ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
The Common ◽  
Moral Faculty ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Church

Francis Hutcheson is commonly seen as a theorist of natural rights, including the right to a free conscience. However, his notion of conscience is of a moral faculty that is subject to education and, under certain circumstances, to political control. By distinguishing between the possession and the exercise of a right, Hutcheson is able to argue that the right to toleration of the individual's conscience is dependent upon social and political circumstances and is, in fact, a matter of prudence, not of transcendent status. This argument coheres with Hutcheson>'s emphasis on the fundamental role of the common good in the moral life, with his aesthetic and providentialist idea of morality, and with his Erastian view of the church in general and of the Scottish Kirk in particular. This chapter shows that these ideas made Hutcheson the centre of contemporary controversy.

The Issue of a Science of Politics in Utilitarian Thought

1952 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 1140-1152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Kort
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
History Of

The contested status of the science of politics has compelled its supporters to pursue their endeavor in an atmosphere of continual apology. The contemporary exponents of scientific aspirations in the realm of political phenomena remain on the defensive as they are confronted with the tenacious persistence of two focal problems: (1) Does the study of politics reveal the potentiality of a science, in view of the immense diversity of human behavior, which appears to be unpredictable and beyond control for the purpose of observation? (2) What would constitute the criteria of a science of politics, provided that the possibility of establishing such a discipline is conceded? In its essential features, this dual issue represents the current manifestation of a controversy which emerged in Utilitarian thought. The parties to the dispute were James Mill, Thomas Babington Macaulay (the only participant who cannot be identified with Utilitarianism), and John Stuart Mill. The respective arguments of the contestants were presented in James Mill's Essay on Government (1828), in Macaulay's article, Mill's Essay on Government (1829), and John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic (1843). Although these works have suffered no neglect in the history of political theory, the controversy which they reveal in their combined context has not commanded as much attention as its pertinence to contemporary problems merits.

Are there Natural Rights? The Sceptical Critique and Rights after 1776

2020 ◽  
pp. 56-73
Author(s):  
Nigel Biggar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Other ◽  
Critical Survey ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Positive Rights ◽  
The Common

This chapter moves to extend the testing of the Sceptical Tradition’s objections to natural rights from the pre-modern or early modern periods to classic modern affirmations. It begins with the American and French declarations of the late eighteenth century, before proceeding to two famous treatises of the same period, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and then ending with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenants of the mid-twentieth century. The chapter concludes that its scrutiny of modern affirmations has found ample evidence to substantiate many of the sceptics’ charges: some of the rights asserted are truistic or merely aspirational; others are ludicrously or dangerously abstract, licensing unrealistic hopes and political recklessness; yet others conflate conditional positive rights justified by natural morality with natural rights, misleadingly endowing the former with the universality and inviolability of the latter. Further, David Ritchie’s claim has been substantiated: the content of certain rights cannot be determined by a sheer appeal to ‘nature’, and apart from consideration of the common good in the relevant circumstances. On the other hand, the critical survey of modern natural rights-talk also shows that it can acknowledge the insufficiency of rights for overall political well-being, talk of duties too, and recognise the need for virtue and a cultural matrix that generates it.

Mill and Rousseau: Utility and Rights

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Participatory Democracy ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Other ◽  
Democratic Government ◽  
Public Spirit ◽  
The One ◽  
Theory Of Democracy

This chapter examines some differences between rights-based and utilitarian defenses of democracy by referencing to John Stuart Mill and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Since the early 1960s, Mill and Rousseau have been regarded as theorists of “participatory democracy,” defenders of a classical ideal of citizen virtue and public spirit who could still teach us something about the point of democratic government. The chapter first explains a rights-based theory of democracy and its emphasis on questions of legitimacy and authority before considering how the account of Rousseau and Mill seem to be at odds with the account of the connection between rights and democracy, on the one hand, and between utility and democracy on the other. It suggests that Rousseau's ethics are fundamentally the ethics of natural rights, whereas Mill's ethics are fundamentally utilitarian.

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