What did the Declaration of Independence say about natural rights?
About this video
The speaker explains that natural rights means we are all equal by nature and have a right to freedom, so slavery, created by positive law, violates natural law and natural justice. Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration included a grievance condemning slavery as a war against human nature, but the drafting committee removed it. The speaker argues the founders recognized slavery as unjust, and can be faulted for not living up to their principles, but the Declaration's principles show the enslaved had natural rights too.
You'll be able to
- define natural rights as the Declaration uses the idea.
- explain the difference between natural law and positive law using slavery as an example.
- explain what happened to the slavery paragraph in Jefferson's draft of the Declaration.
Key words
- Natural rights
- Rights every person has by nature, such as freedom, which no government gives or can rightfully take away.
- Natural law
- The moral law based on human nature that tells us what we owe one another.
- Positive law
- Laws made by human governments, which can be just or unjust.
- Grievance
- A formal complaint; the Declaration lists grievances against the king.
- Primary document
- A source written at the time by people involved, like letters or drafts.
Transcript
We should jump really to the most controversial aspect of the Declaration, Slavery. Slavery is to treat another person with injustice, to not recognize their natural rights. Natural right is just a way of saying, look, we're all equal by nature. That means we all have a right to freedom by nature. Slavery, which is instituted by the positive law, goes against the natural law, goes against natural justice.
Natural rights are where talking about what we owe to one another by nature, on account of our creative nature, to use the terms of the Declaration. The rough draft of the Declaration of Independence has a paragraph unfortunately omitted by the drafting committee. But in Jefferson's original draft, condemning slavery as a war against human nature. That was in one of the grievances. The way I talk to my students about this is if you want to know what the founders thought about race and slavery, should just read what they say about race and slavery. If you do that work and look up the primary documents, what you see is they recognize that it's unjust by nature. It's a crime against human nature. That's their own language. My personal opinion is we can fault them in a sense for not living up to their principals.
But the Declaration is meant to assert the principles of the regime, and slavery clearly violates the principles of human equality and that's the natural rights of the enslaved. Slaves have natural rights too.
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