5.2 Theories of Human Rights

1. Natural theory: the oldest foundation — rights precede the state: from Stoicism's universal reason through Locke's natural rights (life, liberty, property) to the Enlightenment's declarations (the American 1776 and French 1789 texts — natural rights made constitutional). The claim: because humans are rational beings with inherent dignity, they hold rights by nature; the state exists to protect them — the social contract's logic; unjust laws violating natural rights are not true law (the natural-law jurisprudence — LAW 301's cross-read). Strength: the universality and the limits-on-state argument's power. Critique: whose nature? the metaphysics' contestability; the historical abuse (the "natural" rights long denied to women and the colonized — the theory's honest audit). 2. Liberal theory: rights as the political guarantees of individual autonomy — the person's freedom as the primary good; the state's neutrality among conceptions of the good; the rights as trumps (Dworkin's image) against collective goals; the justice-as-fairness frame (Rawls — the equal basic liberties' priority); the marketplace-and-civil-society space the rights protect. Strength: the anti-totalitarian architecture — the individual's protection against the majority's tyranny. Critique: the formal-equality blindness (the liberty of the property-less); the rights' individualism against the community; the economic-and-social rights' marginalization the liberal frame resisted — the generations' quarrel of Unit 6. 3. Marxist theory: the critique — rights as the bourgeois ideology: the declared equal…