The Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights

The philosophical question underlying human rights is what could justify claims to rights that are held to be universal — possessed by every human being simply in virtue of being human, independent of citizenship, positive legal enactment, or particular cultural membership — and this question predates, while also directly informing, the specific post-1945 international legal instruments that codify such rights. The modern natural-rights tradition, developed by John Locke (1632–1704) in the Second Treatise of Government (1689), grounds rights to life, liberty, and property in a state of nature governed by a law of nature discoverable by reason, prior to and independent of any government, so that legitimate government exists only to secure rights people already possess rather than to create them; this Lockean framework directly shaped the language of "unalienable Rights" in the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776) and the "natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of man" proclaimed in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789).