RIGHT(S) IN OCKHAM A Reasonable Vision of Politics

Abstract

The bearing of medieval and early modern thought on current issues is particularly striking with regard to natural rights. Is the whole conception of natural rights distinctively western or does it have sound broader applications? Is it valid even for the West? Which articulations of the idea, and with what surrounding philosophical or religious assumptions, are most fruitful or most dubious? Such questions have been central to decades of scholarly controversy over the mutual compatibility and historical filiations of two ideas of natural right(s) found in late medieval scholasticism, the ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective’ – ‘natural right‘ and ‘natural rights’. The two ideas turn on two senses of the Latin term ius. In one sense, ius means “what is right” or “that which is just (id quod iustum est)”, the object or objective of the moral virtue of justice and, by extension, of just legislators or judges. In the other sense, ius means ‘a right’, a legal or moral power someone has. ‘Subjective’ simply refers to the someone – the subject – who has the ius. In the debate about scholastic theories of right(s), William of Ockham has sometimes been identified as the primary source for an idea of subjective rights as arbitrary powers of radically isolated individuals, an idea supposedly derivable from Ockham’s voluntarist nominalism and in sharp contrast to a classical, objective conception of justice and rightness