Natural Law, Natural Rights, and Human Rights: The Theoretical Turn of Natural Law and the Formation of the Concept of Human Rights

BO Zhenfeng*

Abstract: The rise of rationality and the development of science led to the transformation of the teleological view of nature to the mechanistic view of nature in the West. This transformation gradually separated “human nature” and “the nature of things”—which were unified in the classical era — thereby causing a discontinuity between the natural law tradition and the classical era. From then on, natural law, which had integrated physical natural law and jurisprudential natural law in the classical era, split into two parts: the “rules of nature” that reflect the order of the natural world, and “natural law” that regulates human social life. It was within this discontinuity that “natural rights” in the subjective sense emerged from natural law. Since then, natural rights have been used as the foundation for the legitimacy of the state. This established the basic argumentative model of modern political theory and also provided a new ideological source for justifying the legitimacy of state power. When the metaphysical or theological connotations inherent in natural rights were stripped away, natural rights evolved into “rights of humanity,” and thus the concept of “human rights” was formally born.

Keywords: mechanistic view of nature · natural law · natural rights · human rights