Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Friday, March 29th, 2024

Government Should Protect Citizens’ Natural Rights

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Government Should Protect Citizens’ Natural Rights

Proponents of divine natural law contend that law must be made to conform to the commands they believe were laid down or inspired by God, or some other deity, who governs according to principles of compassion, truth, and justice. These naturalists assert that the legitimacy of any enacted human law must be measured by its consonance with divine principles of right and wrong. Such principles can be found in various religious texts, Islamic sources, church doctrine and the decisions of ecclesiastical courts and councils. Human laws that are inconsistent with divine principles of morality, naturalists maintain, are invalid and should neither be enforced nor obeyed.

Before the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, Europe was divided into two competing jurisdictions — secular and religious. The emperors, kings, and queens of Europe governed the secular jurisdiction, and the pope presided over the religious jurisdiction. The idea that monarchs ruled by “divine right” allowed the secular jurisdiction to acquire some of the authority of religious jurisdiction. Moreover, the notion that a “higher law” transcends the rules enacted by human institutions and that government is bound by this law, also known as the Rule of Law, fermented during the struggle between the secular and religious powers in Europe before the American Revolution. For example, Henry de Bracton, an English judge and scholar from the thirteenth century, wrote that a court’s allegiance to the law and to God is above its allegiance to any ruler or lawmaker.

The influence of divine natural law pervaded the colonial period of U.S. law. In 1690 English philosopher John Locke wrote that all people are born with the inherent rights to life, liberty, and estate. These rights are not unlimited, Locke said, and may only be appropriated according to the fair share earned by the labor of each person. Gluttony and waste of individual liberty are not permitted, Locke argued.

In the Declaration of Independence of American, Thomas Jefferson, borrowing from Locke, wrote that “all men are created equal … and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights … [including] life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Jefferson identified the freedom of thought as one of the inalienable rights when he said, “Almighty God has created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint.” the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the importance of the divine influence in early U.S. law, stating that the “right to pursue happiness is placed by the Declaration of Independence among the inalienable rights of man, not by the grace of emperors or kings, or by the force of legislative or constitutional enactments, but by the Creator.”

The school of natural law known as secular natural law replaces the divine laws with the physical, biological, and behavioral laws of nature as understood by human reason. This school theorizes about the uniform and fixed rules of nature, particularly human nature, to identify moral and ethical norms. Influenced by the rational empiricism of the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers who stressed the importance of observation and experiment in arriving at reliable and demonstrable truths, secular natural law elevates the capacity of the human intellect over the spiritual authority of religion.

Many secular natural law theorists base their philosophy upon hypotheses about human behavior in the state of nature, a primitive stage in human evolution before the creation of governmental institutions and other complex societal organizations. In the state of nature, John Locke wrote, human beings live according to three principles — liberty, equality, and self-preservation. Because no government exists in the state of nature to offer police protection or regulate the distribution of goods and benefits, each individual has a right to self-preservation that he or she may exercise on equal footing with everyone else.

This right includes the liberties to enjoy a peaceful life, accumulate wealth and property, and otherwise satisfy personal needs and desires consistent with the coterminous liberties of others. Anyone who deprives another person of his or her rights in the state of nature, Locke argued, violates the principle of equality. Ultimately, Locke wrote, the state of nature proves unsatisfying. Human liberty is neither equally fulfilled nor protected. Because individuals possess the liberty to delineate the limits of their own personal needs and desires in the state of nature, greed, narcissism, and self-interest eventually rise to the surface, causing irrational and excessive behavior and placing human safety at risk. Thus, Locke concluded, the law of nature leads people to establish a government that is empowered to protect life, liberty, and property.

Lockean natural law prohibits the government from taking “life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” The concept of “due process” has been a continuing source of natural law in constitutional jurisprudence. If Lockean natural law involves theorizing about the scope of human liberty in the state of nature, constitutional natural law involves theorizing about the scope of liberty protected by the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

In short, man is born with natural rights, especially the rights to life, liberty and property, and the government is supposed to protect his rights. After all, the natural rights are not absolute and government can take them with “due process of law.” For instance, a criminal who is sentenced to death by law, should be punished. But the gist is that government is tasked with protecting the citizens and their rights.

Hujjatullah Zia is a permanent writer of Daily Outlook Afghanistan. He can be reached at zia_hujjat@yahoo.com

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