Toward a Theory of Empirical Natural Rights

Summary

With the publication of Anarchy, State, and Utopia in 1974, Robert Nozick breathed new life into the natural rights tradition of political philosophy. By opening his book with the statement “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights),” Nozick stimulated two distinct lines of philosophical investigation: a future-oriented inquiry into the implications that the existence of fundamental individual rights holds for morally acceptable public policy, and a backward-looking inquiry into the sources of and foundations for these rights. In this essay, I propose to pursue the latter line of inquiry.

To this end, I will begin with a brief overview of natural rights political philosophy in Section II. Because Nozick explicitly adopts John Locke's conception of natural rights as his own, I will first survey both Locke's and Nozick's rights-based arguments for limited government. I will then suggest that although both arguments are quite powerful, their persuasive force can be no greater than that of the underlying arguments for the existence of the natural rights upon which they rest. I will conclude Section II by suggesting that neither Locke nor Nozick has supplied an adequate version of the necessary underlying arguments.

Rather than attempting to supply this lack myself, I will offer in Section III an alternative conception of natural rights as rights that naturally evolve in the state of nature. I will then argue that these “empirical natural rights” form a good approximation of the negative rights to life, liberty, and property on which both Locke and Nozick rest their arguments and that such rights are normatively well grounded.