ABSTRACT

Doctrines of natural law and natural rights have a long and impressive history from the Stoics and Roman jurists to the Atlantic Charter and Roosevelt's Four Freedoms. There seems no doubt that the assertions of certain Greek philosophers about the "natural" equality of men and their consequent right to freedom caused intelligent contemporaries to become uneasy about the institution of slavery. For in the theory which conceived of natural rights as guaranteed by a "natural" law, the position seems to have been considered in the following terms. It seems probable that the concept of natural law influenced the later conception of natural or scientific laws obtained by the observation of natural events. It was essential for the social contract theorists to deny that all rights are the gift of civil society, since existing societies denied certain rights which they affirmed.