Human Rights in the Natural Law Tradition

Human Rights in the Natural Law Tradition

This chapter explores the distinctive features of natural law approaches to explaining and defending human rights. Human rights are not a basic concept in the natural law outlook. Rather, they are subsidiary to the more fundamental notion of intrinsic human goods. Nonetheless, the natural law outlook offers a straightforward and compelling way of deriving human rights from intrinsic goods. This derivation proceeds by showing how goods generate reasons for action, which in turn produce duties toward others. These duties then correlate to rights.

The chapter elaborates and defends a specific version of the natural law argument for human rights outlined above. It then explores some advantages of the natural law approach to human rights, showing how it defuses criticisms of rights discourse advanced from both within and outside the natural law tradition. The priority of goods over duties, and duties over rights, in the natural law outlook offers an antidote to the individualistic and positional tendencies of rights claims in political arenas. It also helps to ensure that rights claims do not obscure or override the primary role of the common good in shaping political obligations.

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