Explaining Natural Rights: Ontological Freedom and the Foundations of Political Discourse
Most people think that humans have rights. This popular view now has a great deal of legal authority to support it. Human rights are enshrined in a plethora of international legal instruments, from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights to regional conventions such as the European Convention on Human Rights and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights. In the domestic sphere, an increasing number of jurisdictions are adopting formal bills of rights, either at the constitutional level or in the form of legislation. Judges in many countries are increasingly willing to draw on international human rights conventions to inform their interpretations of domestic law. More generally, political and legal discourse abounds with references to putative human rights, from the right to freedom of speech to the right to government aid in times of hardship.
The idea that human beings have certain fundamental rights simply by virtue of being human beings has a long philosophical tradition behind it. Philosophers often call these rights natural rights. In attempting to make sense of the philosophical debates surrounding this notion, it is useful to distinguish three questions that theorists have sought to answer. Let us call them the explanatory question, the analytical question, and the normative question.
