90
edits
Changes
no edit summary
[[File:John Locke Crop.png|left|270px|thumbnail|John Locke]]Clearly, this sounds quite different, still, from our contemporary understanding of human rights. As was already noted, the medieval conception of human value and dignity is specifically and unavoidably connected to God. There is another major shift from an Imageo Dei understanding of value and dignity to a natural rights understanding of value and dignity that occurs during the enlightenment, as is typical for many paradigm shifts in Western History. This is but one more evolutionary development that will eventually lead us to the modern conception of human rights we observe in the West. For this development we have, mainly, John Locke to thank.
From Locke we gain the theory of “natural rights.” For John Locke natural rights were heavily predicated on the conception of the natural law, inherited from the medieval period. It is the natural law which purported that individuals were made in the Imageo Dei and thus should be valued as dignified individualssuch, as discussed earlier. Locke argued that due to the “law of nature,” or the natural law, all men were obliged to observe what are described as natural rights to life, liberty, health, possessions, etc. He argues this explicitly in The <i>Two Treatises on Civil Government</i>: “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions… (and) when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.”<ref>John Locke, <i>Two Treatises of Government</i>, ed. Thomas Hollis (London: A. Millar et al., 1764).</ref>
These, for Locke, much like the value endowed to every human being as being made in the Imago Dei, were inherent and thus, inalienable. Further, it is with a strong Christian theological framework that Locke can make such a claim. Because of this ever-present theological foundation and motivation, many scholars dissociate Locke from the modern, human rights discourse.<ref>Seagrave, S. Adam. "How Old Are Modern Rights? On the Lockean Roots of Contemporary Human Rights Discourse." Journal Of The History Of Ideas 72, no. 2 (April 2011): 305-32.</ref> However, it would be unfair to dissociate him completely, for he was a clear building block ultimately leading to the modern non-theistic espousal of “human rights.”