Natural Rights & Natural Law

At the core of Nozick's libertarian conception of natural law and natural rights is an argument toward the rationale for the (minimal) state, which is appropriately constituted to the degree that it incurs an obligation to the citizenry that constitutes it, based on its unique capability and capacity to protect that citizenry from external aggression and from internal anarchy. The overriding obligation of the state is to protect the physical security of individual citizens. With that security presumed, Nozick argues the issue of rights from the standpoint of justly acquired or transferred holdings. This is framed by Nozick as entitlement theory, with entitlements an attribute of the history of actions (i.e., acquisitions and transfers) that have determined the distribution of entitlements or justice. One concept of distributive justice is what Nozick refers to as unhistorical, based as it is on the desired ends of distribution, which are often determined by the authority of the state.

[W]e shall refer to such unhistorical principles . . . as end-result principles or end-state principles.

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hat the individual self aspires to): "To say that I possess a certain trait or desire or ambition is to say that I am related to it in a certain way--it is mine rather than yours--and also that I am distanced from it in a certain way--that it is mine rather than me" (Sandel 55). The rational capacity to appreciate this tension gives rise to the individual's capacity to consider right as an attribute of justice, and justice as the foundation of social experience. Sandel refers to the "human agency as the faculty by which the self comes by its ends" (57-58). The focus is on the human agency as a whole, not as something that is determined by what is possessed in some specific way. Specifically, he argues against the view that one could sell oneself into slavery. If the moral category of right precedes the good, and if slavery as a category of experience is not good, then it follows that slavery cannot accord with authentic right. Sandel's argument takes the form of reference to inalienable rights cited in the Declaration of Independence. He notes that such rights are "not what we have as free men but rather what we are. The endowment is less a possession than a nature of a certain kind; he who would abnegate his liberty or pursue a
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Approximate Word count = 2373
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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