Dominion of Self and Natural Rights Before Locke and After

Abstract

The idea of natural rights or human rights, the idea that all humans, by virtue of their very humanity, have certain rights that ought to be acknowledged and protected, is of distinctively western origin. And a major problem of current world politics is to determine whether such rights can be assimilated into the traditional religious cultures of non-western societies. In these circumstances the task of understanding how an idea of natural rights could first grow into existence and then survive in the western world is of more than antiquarian interest. In this paper I want to consider the origin and development of one particular strand of related thought, the ideas of ownership or mastery of self as a ground of natural rights.