Natural law theory in the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) tradition is grounded in a metaphysics of essentialism and teleology, and in turn grounds a theory of natural rights. This chapter offers a brief exposition of the metaphysical ideas in question, explains how the A-T tradition takes a natural law moral system to follow from them, and also explains how in turn the existence of certain basic natural rights follows from natural law. It then explains how the teleological foundations of natural law entail not only that natural rights exist, but also that they are limited or qualified in certain crucial ways. The right to free speech is used as a case study to illustrate these points. Finally, the chapter explains the sense in which the natural rights doctrine generated by A-T natural law theory amounts to a theory of human rights, specifically.

The natural law conception of ethics is more closely associated with Thomas Aquinas than with any other thinker, and Aquinas’ position is famously grounded in a metaphysics of Aristotelian essentialism and teleology. It is often claimed that this metaphysics was decisively undermined by the scientific revolution. Hence it might appear that modern science has refuted what has been, historically, the main approach to understanding natural law.

Alternative versions of natural law may seem to sidestep this difficulty by looking for foundations in something other than an essentialist and teleological conception of nature. For example, Locke’s theory of natural law is grounded in the thesis of divine ownership of human beings. Violating the rights to life, liberty and property that we have under natural law is, for Locke, essentially a matter of damaging God’s property.

F. A. Hayek's long-neglected monograph The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology (1952b) has in recent years begun to garner some attention, most of it from economists or political scientists curious to see what bearing that work has on the foundations of Hayek's economics and social and political thought. Some commentators have also noted the book's relevance to contemporary cognitive science, in particular its foreshadowing of connectionism. Yet few have considered its distinctly philosophical significance - either its place in the history of twentieth-century philosophy or the light it might shed on current controversies in the philosophy of mind.

This is by no means surprising, given that Hayek was not a philosopher by trade. He does not frame the issues he discusses in primarily philosophical terms, and he does not apply to those issues the methods a philosopher would. Notwithstanding his being Wittgenstein's cousin (Hayek [1977] 1992) and his friendship with Karl Popper, he appears not to have sought, nor (except from Popper) was he given, the attention of the mainstream analytic philosophical tradition that dominated the three countries - Austria, England, and the United States - in which he did the bulk of his teaching and writing.

Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992) was almost certainly the most consequential thinker of the mainstream political right in the twentieth century. It is just possible that he was the most consequential twentieth-century political thinker, right or left, period. The apparent triumph of global capitalism at the dawn of the twenty-first century owes as much to his influence on policymakers and shapers of public opinion as it does to that of any other intellectual figure. Hayek's semi-popular book The Road to Serfdom (1944) was a key text of the emerging New Right, a movement whose influence ultimately made possible the elections of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. Reagan claimed that his thinking on economics was directly influenced by Hayek's writings. Thatcher famously tried once to end debate on Conservative Party policy by slamming a copy of Hayek's more dryly academic tome The Constitution of Liberty (1960) down on the table and exclaiming, “This is what we believe!” Even Winston Churchill, long before the New Right's ascendancy, was moved by an (apparently superficial) reading of The Road to Serfdom to warn that the election of his opponent Clement Attlee in 1945 might result in the institution of a “Gestapo” to enforce Attlee's socialist economic policy. (Many suggested at the time that this rash charge might have cost Churchill the election; Hayek's influence on politicians did not always entail their political success.) A John Rawls or Isaiah Berlin, however much greater was the esteem with which such thinkers were regarded by most of their academic peers, could only envy such direct impact on practical politics.

I. Introduction

The thesis of self-ownership is the principle on which many classical liberal and libertarian theorists, from John Locke to Robert Nozick, have founded their political philosophy. The “ownership” part of the thesis, touching as it does on the concepts of property and rights with their obvious political relevance, has understandably been the focus of debate over the principle. Still, it is curious that the other component of the thesis—the “self” that is said to be self-owned—has received so little attention from either the advocates of the thesis or its detractors. Could it be that this neglect is justified? Could it be that questions about the nature of the self are simply tangential to the question of self-ownership per se, and can safely be bracketed off by political theory and left to the metaphysicians? I want to suggest that they cannot be. The thesis of self-ownership, I want to argue, is simply not compatible with just every philosophical conception of the self on offer—and not compatible even with certain conceptions some advocates of the thesis are likely at least implicitly to be committed to when their attention is not on matters of political philosophy. Indeed, as I will try to show, the thesis may in fact be compatible with only one general approach to the metaphysics of the self.

Cohen's views aside, a weak link in Nozick's case might nevertheless be thought to reside in his theory of property rights-rights, that is, to resources external to oneself. Self-ownership may well rule out taxation of earnings from labor, as Nozick insists and as Cohen allows; it may thus doom any scheme of eliminating inequalities in wealth and income arising from prior inequalities in labor-enhancing personal endowments. Still, insofar as there are also inequalities in wealth and income that derive from inequalities in initial holdings in external resources, the egalitarian may be thought to have a toehold, for even if it is granted that you own yourself and your talents, labor, and the like, it is another question whether you own anything else. If it can be shown that you do not own, or at least do not fully own, those external resources that you have utilized in exercising your self-owned powers to acquire the wealth you possess, then the question of the redistribution of some of that wealth via taxation would appear to be reopened.

Nozick's theory of property rights has three components: the principle of justice in acquisition, which concerns the way in which previously unowned resources can justly come to be owned; the principle of justice in transfer, which concerns the way in which one might justly come to own a holding previously owned by someone else; and the principle of justice in rectification, which concerns the way in which past injustices in acquisition and transfer are to be corrected.