Human Rights

Arguably, the idea of human rights culminated in the natural rights theories that characterize modern legal and political thought. The idea of natural rights may be contrasted with earlier teachings about natural law that were grounded in more robust principles of reason and natural or divine teleology. Many important thinkers of early modern Europe subscribed to a version of natural law without endorsing a doctrine of human rights. Central to the concept of natural rights is the view that each and every human being enjoys a complete and exclusive dominion over his or her mental and bodily facilities and the fruits thereof in the form of personal property. Thus, a human rights theory entails a conception of private ownership grounded in the subjective status of the individual human being. The rights arising from such human subjectivity are both inalienable and imprescriptible, in the sense that any attempt to renounce or extinguish them would constitute the cessation of one's personhood. Thus, for example, human rights theory renders incoherent arguments for slavery based on alleged human inequalities of intellect or physique.

Consequently, an important feature of the fully developed idea of natural rights is its direct and immediate political bearing. Given that natural rights may not be curtailed or eliminated without the denial to a person of his or her very humanity, any government that attempts to suppress them has no claim to the obedience of its citizens. Natural rights always take precedence over artificial communal or public rights that might be imposed by political institutions. In this way, the doctrine of natural rights circumscribes political power and may even generate a defense of resistance to or revolt against systems of government that violate the rights of persons.

One of the epochal moments that posed a challenge to the doctrine of human rights was the European encounter with the Americas. While the Roman Church had long experience with questions arising from the legal status of "infidels," the discovery of entire civilizations that had experience neither of European culture nor of Christian religion—in conjunction with the fact that they were rich in natural and mineral resources—created a severe intellectual crisis, especially in the Iberian world. Some thinkers were willing, on slender evidence, to equate the inhabitants of the Indies with Aristotelian "barbarians" or "slaves by nature." But Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566), a member of the Spanish conquering class in the New World who experienced a profound change of heart, produced a voluminous body of writings that argued in favor of the "rights" of indigenous peoples. Las Casas drew on canonistic and civil legal literature, as well as scholastic and humanistic political discourse, to develop a polemical case that the inhabitants of Central and South America enjoyed an unfettered right (individually and collectively) to live unmolested by Europeans and to resist with force those who would kill or enslave them. Las Casas's clear invocation of human rights suggests that a water-shed had been reached.