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• Literature of Liberty a Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought
• Editorial Staff
• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Henry B. Veatch, Natural Law: Dead Or Alive?
• I: Natural Law
• “nature” and “law” In Natural Law
• The Anatomy of Natural Rights
• Egoism and Rights
• The Is/ought Chimera
• Deriving “ought” From “is”
• Facts Vs. Value-laden Whims
• Is/ought and Probable Reasons
• Does Righteous Anger Imply Rights?
• Why Be Moral?
• Truth As an Objective Value
• Was the Revolution Objectively Necessary?
• Natural Law and State of Nature
• Natural Law and the State
• Natural Rights and Anarchism
• Dworkin On Rights
• Liberalism, Rights, and Abortion
• Rights and “mercy Killing”
• Rights and the “brain Drain”
• The Natural Law Right to Work
• Grotius: Contract and Natural Law
• Rights and Communication
• II: Autonomy, Privacy, and Authority
• Bureaucracy and “the Organization Man”
• Autonomy and Anarchism
• Autonomy and Taking Responsibility
• Autonomy, Motivation, and “buck-passing”
• Schooling For Conformity
• The Schoolroom Vs. Autonomy
• Obedience to Authority
• The Meaning of Privacy
• Privacy and Autonomy
• Privacy and Consent
• The Court and Privacy
• III: The Ambiguities of Liberty
• Clarifying Freedom
• Rehabilitating Mill's “harm Principle”
• Experiencing Freedom
• Do Offers Coerce Freedom?
• The Danger of “dangerousness”
• Freedom, Motivation, and Government Programs
• Freedom Vs. Determinism
• Negative Vs. Positive Freedom
• Smith and Utilitarian Economic Freedom
• Locke, Freedom, and Tacit Consent
• Religious Freedom
• Freedom, Existentialism, and Innocent Victims
• Does Censorship Harm Freedom?
• IV: Slavery
• Slavery, Ideology, and Subordination
• Slavery and Imperialist Ideology
• Enlightenment Liberalism Vs. Slavery
• The Anatomy of a Slave Revolt
• Colonial American Slave Law
• Jefferson On Slavery
• Slavery and the Poor
• V: Planning
• Regulation and the Warfare State
• Mail, Privacy, and Social Control
• Corporate State Capitalism: Coal
• French War “planification”: Chlorates
• Bureaucracy and British Regulation
• British Foreign Policy and Stagnation
• Political Decisions and the Economy
• Government, Labor, and Multinationals
• Black Markets Vs. Regulation
• Regulation Vs. Academic Autonomy
• Government Schools and Social Control
• The Economics of Charity
• International State Planning and Inflation
• Competition and Individual Knowledge

The Anatomy of Natural Rights

Tibor R. Machan

• State University of New York/Fredonia

“Human History and Human Natural Rights.” In Human Rights and Human Liberties: A Radical Reconsideration of the American Political Tradition. Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1975, pp. 2–46.

A disturbing moral paradox looms over modern culture. On the one hand, it is common to rhetorically invoke natural rights to protest local and international violations of human rights. On the other hand, it is no less common for philosophers to maintain that no convincing rational theory can justify natural rights. How did the doctrine of natural rights arise and how did it come to suffer Jeremy Bentham's sceptical caricature of it as “nonsense upon stilts”?

Historically, natural rights theory evolved to answer the perennial human question: Can we rationally know what is right and wrong in morality and politics, or are these urgent issues merely matters of subjective opinion, sentiment, and convention? Despite kaleidoscopic diversity, the natural law tradition from Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero to Aquinas and more contemporary exponents, has tended to affirm the reality of an objective and natural “court of last resort” capable of settling human disputes in ethics and politics. Natural rights advocates appealed not to shifting nomos (convention, custom, or man-made law) but to the more stable physis (nature, especially human nature) as an intersubjective arbiter by which human reason could adjudicate questions about values.

Natural right is closely related to, and at times conflated with, natural law: “... natural right is to natural law as truth is to fact—the first are aspects of beliefs, ideas, or statements, while the latter are what exists, about which beliefs, ideas, or statements are entertained, thought, or uttered, respectively.” Natural rights theory, basing its beliefs about right personal conduct on the widely varying interpretations of what philosophers viewed as human nature, received different formulations at the hands of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, and Locke. Plato and Aristotle regarded reason and free will as the distinguishing features of human nature, whereas Hobbes saw man as psychophysically determined, and viewed reason as a tool of the passions whose only absolute was individual survival. Within the natural rights and natural law tradition, dissent also raged as to how absolute and unchanging were such norms.

These and other internal debates set the stage for many moderns to reject natural rights theory by challenging the core of natural law: the possibility of rationally understanding the truth about the world, human nature, and moral or political rightness. Resurrecting pre-Socratic sceptical attacks, David Hume (1711–1776) fathered the radical challenge of the very possibility of scientific moral knowledge. In his Treatise on Human Nature Hume claimed that an unbridgeable gap separated factual “is” statements and moralizing “ought” statements: How can we legitimately cross over from empirical knowledge of value-free facts to claim that we know what is morally good, right, wrong, or evil? This Humean fact/value distinction has exercised a weighty influence on subsequent philosophy and the social sciences, which characteristically restrict themselves to value-free evidence and argument over positive facts for fear of unscientifically trespassing into the “ought” of value.