Rights and Classical Liberalism

Abstract

Rights have a special place at the core of classical liberalism. That each individual is a holder of the same rights, correlative with duties in all others, enshrines a deep egalitarian individualism that is at the center of liberal social philosophy. It is through the lens of rights that our freedom and equality are revealed to be internally related. One of the most important kinds of rights is property rights, as they protect our external interaction with one another with regard to the physical world and enable us to pursue meaningful projects and cooperate in economic production. The rights of the state, on the classical liberal view, are always strictly servile to the rights of individuals, the state being there purely to facilitate the freedom of its members and not enjoying any intrinsic value unto itself. The classical liberal approach to rights is grounded in either natural law or conventionality. Disagreement over the normative function and substance of rights seldom covaries with disagreements over the ontology of rights.

Keywords: Rights, Freedom, Equality, Liberalism, Natural law, Convention, Property