Why were natural rights important to the founders?

0:05[MUSIC] The question of natural rights comes up in the 18th century when the founders are beginning to search for a basis for political authority that goes beyond the idea of divine right kingship that a lot of the monarchs in Europe. For example, Louis the XIV, Louis XV, and all of the Stuart monarchs of the 17th century were beginning to latch onto. The idea of natural right comes to them ultimately from the ancient Romans, who have this idea of natural law as something that exists out there in the world. Nobody really knows how it does, but it just does. They get this from philosophers. Chiefly the stoics. People, for example, Seneca, et cetera, who are also thinking about what it means to be a human, what it means to be

0:57governed in the world. The founders begin to pick up and develop this idea of natural law in the 18th century. From this, ultimately, they derive the idea of natural rights, which is a capacity, an entitlement that every single human being has by virtue of being a human being. That means that animals and plants, for example, don't have natural rights, but all human beings do. Now, we look at that from our own perspective, and we say, well, yeah, what's so great about that idea, of course, we all do. But that's because we come from 250 years of this tradition. But the 17th and 18th centuries were very hierarchical societies where some people were just believed to be better than others. The aristocracy, for example, that just simply means those who are

1:55the best. To say that there is something that is called a natural right that you'd have and I have, by virtue of simply having been born, whether our parents were kings or poppers, is a really radical thing to say. They grab onto this idea, and then over the course of the Declaration of Independence of 1776, and then the Constitution making era of the late 1780s, they really begin to develop as the basis for this radical new idea of total popular sovereignty. [MUSIC]