Questions: Enlightenment Natural Rights Philosophy

Question 1

Under the feudal/medieval view versus Locke's natural rights theory, what is the fundamental difference in how rights originate?

• A. Medieval thinkers believed rights were rational; Locke believed they were religious in origin
• B. Medieval thinkers saw rights as privileges flowing downward from authority; Locke held that rights inhere in persons prior to any government and cannot be legitimately taken away
• C. Medieval thinkers believed rights applied to all humans; Locke restricted natural rights to property-owning men
• D. Medieval thinkers grounded rights in natural law; Locke grounded rights entirely in social contract and consent

Answer: (B)

The key reversal: in feudal thinking, rights are grants — a king bestows privileges on lords, lords extend protections to peasants. Rights flow downward from authority. Locke inverts this completely: rights exist prior to government and are not created by it. They inhere in persons by virtue of humanity and reason. Government is created through social contract not to grant rights but to better protect rights that already exist. This reversal is what makes natural rights theory politically radical — it transforms subjects into right-bearers who can hold government accountable.

Question 2

What is the logical political consequence of natural rights theory when a government systematically violates the rights it was formed to protect?

• A. Citizens are morally obligated to continue obeying government until a new election can replace it
• B. The government retains its legitimacy because authority derives from established law, not rights protection
• C. Resistance or revolution is justified, because the government has forfeited its claim to obedience by violating its foundational purpose
• D. Citizens may petition for reform but may not take physical action, as natural rights theory is inherently pacifist

Answer: (C)

This is the politically explosive implication of Locke's theory. If government's only legitimate purpose is to protect natural rights, and it instead systematically violates them, it has broken the social contract and forfeited its claim to obedience. Locke wrote the Two Treatises explicitly to justify Parliament's deposition of James II (1688). The American Declaration of Independence applied the same logic directly: the long train of abuses by the Crown justified revolution. This right of resistance distinguishes natural rights theory from mere reform liberalism.

Question 3

In Locke's natural rights theory, government authority is legitimate only insofar as it protects the natural rights — to life, liberty, and property — that individuals already possessed in the state of nature, before any government existed.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

This is the foundational claim of Lockean theory. Rights are pre-political — they exist in the state of nature, grounded in human reason and natural law. The social contract does not create rights; it creates an institution to better secure rights that already exist. Authority is therefore derivative and conditional: it is granted by consent of the governed for the purpose of rights protection, and extends no further than that purpose. This contrasts with divine right monarchy (authority from God) and Hobbesian theory (authority from the need to escape the war of all against all).

Question 4

Natural rights theorists like Locke argued that rights are created through the social contract — that people have rights mainly because they agreed to establish a government that defines and enforces those rights.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This inverts Locke's actual position. For Locke, rights pre-exist the social contract — they are natural, not constructed. The social contract creates government for the purpose of better protecting rights people already have. If rights were merely created by social contract, then government could redefine or revoke them at will, and there would be no grounds for saying government 'violates' rights. The pre-political grounding of rights is precisely what gives them their force as a check on government power.

Question 5

Explain the contradiction between natural rights theory's universalist claims and the actual political practice of the states it inspired, and identify its historical significance.

Model answer: Natural rights theory claims rights are universal — they inhere in all humans by virtue of their humanity and reason, not rank, nationality, or gender. Yet the governments it inspired initially extended full rights only to propertied men, excluded women from political participation, and (in America) preserved slavery through elaborate rationalizations. This gap became the central contested terrain of the following two centuries. Abolitionists, suffragists, anti-colonial movements, and civil rights activists all drew on the same natural rights vocabulary to expose the contradiction and demand inclusion.

The theory's universalist logic proved impossible to permanently contain. Once rights are grounded in humanity rather than privilege, every exclusion becomes philosophically vulnerable: the excluded can ask, 'Are we not also human?' This dynamic drove the progressive expansion of rights claims from the late 18th century onward, explaining why the language of the American Declaration and French Declaration remained politically potent far beyond their original contexts.