4 - A Frayed Quilt

Summary

As discussed in the prior chapter, a civil right, according to Paine’s Rights of Man, is “founded in,” or originates in, a “natural right.” Every civil right, Paine argued, “has as its foundation” a preexisting natural right. And what are “natural rights”? Natural rights generally were understood by Paine and his contemporaries as those rights we have by virtue of our humanity – they speak to a universally shared human quality, need, attribute, or potentiality – against any state in which they find themselves, in order to live good and decent lives. I modernized and elaborated on this part of Paine’s definition in the last chapter by borrowing from Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen’s now-familiar conception of “human flourishing” (although not in all respects the content they give it) as the end, or point, of decent legal systems: natural rights are those rights held against states, but also to states, and to state law, that are essential to human flourishing.