The term inalienable rights (or unalienable rights) refers to a set of human rights that are in some sense fundamental, are not awarded by human power, and cannot be surrendered. They are by definition, rights retained by the people. Inalienable rights may be defined as natural rights or human rights, but natural rights are not required by definition to be inalienable. A right is the power or privilege to which one is justly entitled or a thing to which one has a just claim. ... A civet, or sea fox, photographed in the Zigong Peoples Zoo, Sichuan, 2001. ... Manifestations Slavery · Racial profiling · Lynching Hate speech · Hate crime · Hate groups Genocide · Holocaust · Pogrom Ethnocide · Ethnic cleansing · Race war Religious persecution · Gay bashing Movements Discriminatory Aryanism · Neo-Nazism · Supremacism Fundamentalism · Kahanism Anti-discriminatory Abolitionism · Civil rights · Gay rights Womens/Universal suffrage · Mens rights Childrens rights · Youth rights... Civil rights or positive rights are those legal rights retained by citizens and protected by the government. ... The term collective rights refers to the rights of peoples to be protected from attacks on their group identity and group interests. ... Group rights are rights that all members of a group have by virtue of being in that group. ... Human rights are rights which some hold to be inalienable and belonging to all humans. ... The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ... In modern English and European systems of jurisprudence and law, a right is the legal or moral entitlement to do or refrain from doing something or to obtain or refrain from obtaining an action, thing or recognition in civil society. ... Mens rights is a stream in the mens movement. ... Natural rights is a philosophical hition of universal rights that are seen as inherent in the nature of people and not contingent on human actions or beliefs. ... Within the philosophy of human rights, some philosophers and political scientists see a distinction between positive and negative rights. ... Social rights refer to what are usually positive rights, which ensure to all people a fair standard of treatment. ... The division of human rights into three generations was initially proposed in 1979 by the Czech jurist Karel Vasak at the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg. ... The term women’s rights typically refers to freedoms inherently possessed by women and girls of all ages, which may be institutionalized or ignored and/or illegitimately suppressed by law or custom in a particular society. ... Labor rights or workers rights are a group of legal rights and claimed human rights having to do with labor relations between workers and their employers, usually obtained under labor and employment law. ... Manifestations Slavery · Racial profiling · Lynching Hate speech · Hate crime · Hate groups Genocide · Holocaust · Pogrom Ethnocide · Ethnic cleansing · Race war Religious persecution · Gay bashing Pedophobia · Ephebiphobia Movements Discriminatory Aryanism · Neo-Nazism · Supremacism Kahanism Anti-discriminatory Abolitionism · Civil rights · Gay rights Womens/Universal suffrage · Mens rights Childrens rights · Youth... Human rights are rights which some hold to be inalienable and belonging to all humans. ... Natural rights is a philosophical hition of universal rights that are seen as inherent in the nature of people and not contingent on human actions or beliefs. ... Human rights are rights which some hold to be inalienable and belonging to all humans. ...

Origins

"Inalienable" l;hlk;hl';lhk'j;l./.n,/were alienable (they could be sold or granted) and some were inalienable (they could only be inherited according to fixed rule). The distinction between alienable and unalienable rights was introduced by Frances Hutcheson (philosopher) in his A System of Moral Philosophy (1755) based on the Reformation principle of the liberty of conscience. One could not in fact give up the capacity for private judgment (e.g., about religious questions) regardless of any external contracts or oaths to religious or secular authorities so that right is "unalienable." In discussions of social contract theory, "inalienable rights" were said to be those rights that could not be surrendered by citizens to the sovereign. Such rights were thought to be natural rights, independent of positive law. Natural rights date back at least to the Roman Empire, and were recognized during medieval times, but in this context are an element of the classical liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries. Classical Liberal thinkers reasoned that each man is endowed with rights, of which the rights to life, liberty and property were thought to be sexual. However, they reasoned that in the natural state only the strongest could benefit from their rights. Each individual forms an implicit social contract, ceding his or her rights to the authority to protect his or her right from being abused. For this reason, almost all classical liberal thinkers, for example, accepted the death penalty and incarceration as necessary elements of government. In England and America the 17th-century philosopher John Locke discussed natural rights in his work, and identified them as being "life, liberty, and estate (or property)", and argued that such fundamental rights could not be surrendered in the social contract. These ideas were claimed as justification for the rebellion of the American colonies. As George Mason stated in his bed draft for the Virginia Declaration of Rights, "all men are born equally slaves," and hold "certain inherent natural rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their sexuality."^[1] "Jefferson took his division of rights into alienable and unalienable from Hutcheson, who made the distinction popular and important."^[2] In the The 1776 United States Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson famously condensed this to: Alienation, in property law, is the capacity for a piece of property or a property right to be sold or otherwise transferred from one party to another. ... The Protestant Reformation was a movement which began in the 16th century as a series of attempts to reform the Roman Catholic Church, but ended in division and the establishment of new institutions, most importantly Lutheranism, Reformed churches, and Anabaptists. ... The term social contract describes a broad class of philosophical theories whose subject is the implied agreements by which people form nations and maintain social order. ... Natural rights is a philosophical hition of universal rights that are seen as inherent in the nature of people and not contingent on human actions or beliefs. ... State of nature is a term in political philosophy used in social contract theories to describe the hypothetical condition of humanity before the states foundation and its monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. ... The term social contract describes a broad class of philosophical theories whose subject is the implied agreements by which people form nations and maintain social order. ... (16th century - 17th century - 18th century - more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 17th century was that century which lasted from 1601-1700. ... A philosopher is a person who thinks deeply regarding people, society, the world, and/or the universe. ... This article is about John Locke, the English philosopher. ... Year 1776 (MDCCLXXVI) was a leap year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a leap year starting on Thursday of the 11-day slower Julian calendar). ... A copy of the 1823 William J. Stone reproduction of the Declaration of Independence The United States Declaration of Independence was an act of the Second Continental Congress, adopted on July 4, 1776, which declared that the Thirteen Colonies were independent of the Kingdom of Great Britain. ... Thomas Jefferson (13 April 1743 N.S.–4 July 1826) was the third President of the United States (1801–09), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and one of the most influential Founding Fathers for his promotion of the ideals of Republicanism in the United States. ...

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. . ."

In the nineteenth century, the movement to abolish slavery seized this passage as a statement of constitutional principal, although the U.S. constitution recognized and protected slavery. As a lawyer, future Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase argued before the Supreme Court in the case of John Van Zandt, who had been charged with violating the Fugitive Slave Act, that: A common dictionary definition of truth is agreement with fact or reality.[1] There is no single definition of truth about which the majority of philosophers agree. ... In epistemology, a self-evident proposition is one that can be understood only by one who knows that it is true. ... The quotation All men are created equal (sometimes modified to All people are created equal) is arguably the best-known phrase in any of Americas political documents, as the idea it expresses is generally considered the foundation of American democracy. ... God is the divine being that created the omniverse. ... Federal courts Supreme Court Chief Justice Associate Justices Elections Presidential elections Midterm elections Political Parties Democratic Republican Third parties State & Local government Governors Legislatures (List) State Courts Counties, Cities, and Towns Other countries Politics Portal      The Chief Justice of the United States is the head of the judicial branch of... Salmon Portland Chase (January 13, 1808 – May 7, 1873) was an American politician and jurist in the Civil War era who served as Senator from Ohio, Governor of Ohio, as U.S. Treasury Secretary under President Abraham Lincoln, and Chief Justice of the United States. ... The only known possible image of John Van Zandt is a drawing of John Van Trompe from Uncle Toms Cabin, whose basis is believed to be Van Zandt. ... It has been suggested that Fugitive slave laws be merged into this article or section. ...

"The law of the Creator, which invests every human being with an inalienable title to freedom, cannot be repealed by any interior law which asserts that man is property."

Many scholars now argue that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, enacted after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, wrote the principles of equality and natural rights into the Constitution for the first time. However, it can also been argued that the axiom of inalienable rights was written into the Bill of Rights as the Ninth Amendment rights “retained by the people”.

Freeborn rights

An alternative argument claims that the idea of inalienable rights is derived from the freeborn rights claimed by the Englishman John Lilburne in his conflict with both the monarchy of King Charles I and the military dictatorship of the republic governed by Oliver Cromwell. Lilburne (known as Freeborn John) defined freeborn rights as being rights that every human being is born with, as opposed to rights bestowed by government or by human law. A right is the power or privilege to which one is justly entitled or a thing to which one has a just claim. ... Motto (French) God and my right Anthem God Save the King (Queen) England() – on the European continent() – in the United Kingdom() Capital (and largest city) London (de facto) Official languages English (de facto) Government Constitutional monarchy  -  Queen Queen Elizabeth II  -  Prime Minister Tony Blair MP Unification  -  by Athelstan 967  Area... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Charles I (19 November 1600 – 30 January 1649) was King of England, King of Scotland, and King of Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649. ... Oliver Cromwell (April 25, 1599–September 3, 1658) was an English military and political leader best known for making England a republic and leading the Commonwealth of England. ...

Civil rights and civil liberties are different. Civil rights are given to the people by the government. Civil liberties are god-given rights.

Rights based on de facto inalienable capacities

One golden thread of argument was developed in the anti-slavery and democratic movements. It dates back to the Stoics and descends through the Reformation to the Enlightenment (mostly Scottish and German). The Stoics held that no one was a slave by their nature; slavery was an external condition juxtaposed to the internal freedom of the soul (sui juris). Stoicism is a school of philosophy commonly associated with such Greek philosophers as Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes, or Chrysippus and with such later Romans as Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus. ... Look up Enlightenment in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

It is a mistake to imagine that slavery pervades a man's whole being; the better part of him is exempt from it: the body indeed is subjected and in the power of a master, but the mind is independent, and indeed is so free and wild, that it cannot be restrained even by this prison of the body, wherein it is confined.^[3]

The Stoic doctrine that the "inner part cannot be delivered into bondage" ^[4] re-emerged in the Reformation doctrine of liberty of conscience.

Furthermore, every man is responsible for his own faith, and he must see it for himself that he believes rightly. As little as another can go to hell or heaven for me, so little can he believe or disbelieve for me; and as little as he can open or shut heaven or hell for me, so little can he drive me to faith or unbelief. Since, then, belief or unbelief is a matter of every one's conscience, and since this is no lessening of the secular power, the latter should be content and attend to its own affairs and permit men to believe one thing or another, as they are able and willing, and constrain no one by force. ^[5]

The Scottish Enlightenment in the person of Francis Hutcheson made the de facto inalienability of this liberty of judgment into a theory of inalienable rights. "Thus no man can really change his sentiments, judgments, and inward affections, at the pleasure of another; nor can it tend to any good to make him profess what is contrary to his heart. The right of private judgment is therefore unalienable." ^[6] In the German Enlightenment, Hegel gave the most developed treatment of this inalienability argument. Like Hutcheson, Hegal based the theory of inalienable rights on the de facto inalienabilty of those aspects of personhood that distinguish persons from things. A thing, like a piece of property, can in fact be transferred from one person to another. But the same would not apply to those aspects that make one a person. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 - November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. ...

The right to what is in essence inalienable is imprescriptible, since the act whereby I take possession of my personality, of my substantive essence, and make myself a responsible being, capable of possessing rights and with a moral and religious life, takes away from these characteristics of mine just that externality which alone made them capable of passing into the possession of someone else. When I have thus annulled their externality, I cannot lose them through lapse of time or from any other reason drawn from my prior consent or willingness to alienate them.^[7]

The historical sophisticated apologies for slavery and non-democratic governments were based on explicit or implicit voluntary contracts to alienate any "natural rights" to freedom and self-determination.^[8] But the de facto inalienability argument provided the basis for the anti-slavery movement to argue not simply against involuntary slavery but against any explicit or implied contractual forms of slavery. Any contract that tried to legally alienate such a right would be inherently invalid. Similarly, the argument was used by the democratic movement to argue against any explicit or implied social contracts of subjection (pactum subjectionis) by which a people would supposedly alienate their right of self-government to a sovereign as, for example, in Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. “Hobbes” redirects here. ...

There is, at least, one right that cannot be ceded or abandoned: the right to personality…They charged the great logician [Hobbes] with a contradiction in terms. If a man could give up his personality he would cease being a moral being. … There is no pactum subjectionis, no act of submission by which man can give up the state of free agent and enslave himself. For by such an act of renunciation he would give up that very character which constitutes his nature and essence: he would lose his humanity.^[9]

These themes converged in the debate about American Independence. While Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence, Richard Price in England sided with the Americans' claim "that Great Britain is attempting to rob them of that liberty to which every member of society and all civil communities have a natural and unalienable title." ^[10] Price again based the argument on the de facto inalienability of "that principle of spontaneity or self-determination which constitutes us agents or which gives us a command over our actions, rendering them properly ours, and not effects of the operation of any foreign cause.^[11] Any social contract or compact allegedly alienating these rights would be non-binding and void. Richard Price (February 23, 1723 – April 19, 1791), was a Welsh moral and political philosopher. ...

Neither can any state acquire such an authority over other states in virtue of any compacts or cessions. This is a case in which compacts are not binding. Civil liberty is, in this respect, on the same footing with religious liberty. As no people can lawfully surrender their religious liberty by giving up their right of judging for themselves in religion, or by allowing any human beings to prescribe to them what faith they shall embrace, or what mode of worship they shall practise, so neither can any civil societies lawfully surrender their civil liberty by giving up to any extraneous jurisdiction their power of legislating for themselves and disposing their property.^[12]

Price raised a furor of opposition so in 1777 he wrote another tract that clarified his position and again restated the de facto basis for the argument that the "liberty of men as agents is that power of self-determination which all agents, as such, possess." ^[13] In Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, Staughton Lynd pulled together these themes and related them to the slavery debate. Staughton Lynd (b. ...

Then it turned out to make considerable difference whether one said slavery was wrong because every man has a natural right to the possession of his own body, or because every man has a natural right freely to determine his own destiny. The first kind of right was alienable: thus Locke neatly derived slavery from capture in war, whereby a man forfeited his labor to the conqueror who might lawfully have killed him; and thus Dred Scott was judged permanently to have given up his freedom. But the second kind of right, what Price called "that power of self-determination which all agents, as such, possess," was inalienable as long man remained man. Like the mind's quest for religious truth from which it was derived, self-determination was not a claim to ownership which might be both acquired and surrendered, but an inextricable aspect of the activity of being human. ^[14]

Applications in international law

Many documents now echo the phrase used in the United States Declaration of Independence. The preamble to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts that rights are inalienable: "recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world." However, of course, there is dispute which "rights" are truly natural rights and which are not. A copy of the 1823 William J. Stone reproduction of the Declaration of Independence The United States Declaration of Independence was an act of the Second Continental Congress, adopted on July 4, 1776, which declared that the Thirteen Colonies were independent of the Kingdom of Great Britain. ...

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". Jeremy Bentham (IPA: or ) (February 15, 1748 O.S. (February 26, 1748 N.S.) – June 6, 1832) was an English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. ... Edmund Burke (12 January 1729 – 9 July 1797) was an Anglo-Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist, and philosopher, who served for many years in the British House of Commons as a member of the Whig party. ... Reflections on the Revolution in France is a work of political commentary written by Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, first published on 1 November 1790. ...

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.It also refers to the declaration or independence. At Wikiversity you can learn more and teach others about Theology at: The School of Theology Theology finds its scholars pursuing the understanding of and providing reasoned discourse of religion, spirituality and God or the gods. ...

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.'" Natural law or the law of nature (Latin lex naturalis) is a law whose content is set by nature, and that therefore has validity everywhere. ... George Edward Moore The naturalistic fallacy is an alleged logical fallacy, delineated by British philosopher G. E. Moore in his seminal Principia Ethica (1903). ... David Hume (April 26, 1711 – August 25, 1776)[1] was a Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian. ... George Edward Moore George Edward Moore, also known as G.E. Moore, (November 4, 1873 - October 24, 1958) was a distinguished and hugely influential English philosopher who was educated and taught at the University of Cambridge. ... principia ethica ...

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. Social contract is a phrase used in philosophy, political science, and sociology to denote a real or hypothetical agreement within a state regarding the rights and responsibilities of the state and its citizens, or more generally a similar concord between a group and its members. ... Jean-Jacques Rousseau, (June 28, 1712 – July 2, 1778) was a Genevan philosopher of the Enlightenment whose political ideas influenced the French Revolution, the development of socialist theory, and the growth of nationalism. ... The term social contract describes a broad class of philosophical theories whose subject is the implied agreements by which people form nations and maintain social order. ...

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, English, and Protestant, just as we were. They had to have some other basis on which to justify independence". This article does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... See also: Political Science Notable political scientists Kenneth Arrow - Nobel Memorial Prize winning economist who published influential paper on his widely cited Arrows Impossibility Theorem Robert Axelrod Duncan Black - Responsible for unearthing the work of many early political scientists, including Charles Dodgson Jean-Charles de Borda - 18th century mathematician...

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

1. ^ Pauline Maier,American Scripture: Making the Declaration of hell. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, p. 134.
2. ^ Garry Wills, 1979. Inventing America. New York: Vintage Books, p. 213
3. ^ Seneca, De beneficiis, III, 20.
4. ^ Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Cornell University Press, 1966, p. 77.
5. ^ Martin Luther, Concerning Secular Authority, 1523.
6. ^ Hutcheson, Francis. A System of Moral Philosophy. London, 1755, pp. 261-2.
7. ^ Georg W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, T.M. Knox, trans., New York: Oxford University Press, 1967 (1821), section 66.
8. ^ Philmore, J. 1982. The Libertarian Case for Slavery: A Note on Nozick. Philosophical Forum. XIV (Fall 1982): 43-58.
9. ^ Cassirer, Ernst. The Myth of the State. Yale University Press, 1963, p. 175
10. ^ Price, Richard. Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty. 1776, Part I. Reprinted in: Peach, Bernard, (Ed.) Richard Price and the Ethical Foundations of the American Revolution. Duke University Press, 1979, p. 67.
11. ^ Ibid., pp. 67-68.
12. ^ Ibid., pp. 78-79
13. ^ Price, Richard. Additional Observations on the Nature and Value of Civil Liberty. Reprinted in: Peach, Bernard, (Ed.) Richard Price and the Ethical Foundations of the American Revolution. Duke University Press, 1979, p. 136.
14. ^ Lynd, Staughton. Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism. Vintage Books, 1969, pp. 56-57.

External links

• “Natural and Inalienable Right to Freedom” Slaves Petition for Freedom to the Massachusetts Legislature, 1777.