Inalienable rights
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The term inalienable rights (or unalienable rights) refers to a theoretical set of human rights that by their nature cannot be transferred from one person to another. They are considered more fundamental than alienable rights, such as rights in a specific piece of property.
Inalienable rights may be defined as natural rights or human rights, but natural rights need not be inalienable.
[edit] Criticism
The concept of inalienable rights was criticized by Jeremy Bentham and Edmund Burke as groundless. Bentham and Burke, writing in the eighteenth century, claimed that rights arise from the actions of government, or evolve from tradition, and that neither of these can provide anything inalienable. (See Bentham's "Critique of the Doctrine of Inalienable, Natural Rights", and Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France"). Keeping with shift in thinking in the 19th century, Bentham famously dismissed the idea of natural rights as "nonsense on stilts".
The signers of the Declaration of Independence deemed it a "self evident truth" that all men are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". Critics, however, argue that use of the word "Creator" signifies that these rights are based on theological principles, and ask which theological principles those are (since none of the major religions of the world assert the existence of inalienable rights), or why those theological principles should be accepted by people who do not adhere to the religion from which they are derived.
Derivation of inalienable rights from Natural Law can also be criticized on solely philosophical grounds. The naturalistic fallacy of David Hume, which is discussed at length in G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica, is the derivation of an "ought" statement from "is" statements with no "ought" premise. Jonathan Wallace claims in his paper "Natural Rights Don't Exist,"[1] that the phrase "We hold these truths to be self-evident" is simply a "more elegant version of 'Because we said so.'"
In "The Social Contract," Jean-Jacques Rousseau claims that the existence of inalienable rights is unnecessary for the existence of a constitution or a set of laws and rights. This idea of a social contract – that rights and responsibilities are derived from a consensual contract between the government and the people – is the most widely recognized alternative.
Samuel P. Huntington, an American political scientist, wrote that the "inalienable rights" argument from the Declaration of Independence was necessary because "The British were white, Anglo, and Protestant, just as we were. They had to have some other basis on which to justify independence".
[edit] References
- Hutcheson, Francis. A System of Moral Philosophy. 1755, London.
- Locke, John. Two Treatises on Government. 1690 (primarily the second treatise)
- Lloyd Thomas, D.A. Locke on Government. 1995, Routledge. ISBN 0-415-09533-6
- Waldron, Jeremy [ed.] Theories of Rights 1984, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-875063-3
[edit] External links
- “Natural and Inalienable Right to Freedom” Slaves Petition for Freedom to the Massachusetts Legislature, 1777.
