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Natural Law and Natural rights: the autonomous of individual



“No Man should be condemned unheard.”-----Lord Eshar
This is the basics of natural Law and Natural rights. Philosophers and jurist did not leave human rights solely to theologians. The latter used theology to present the basis of human rights theory stemming from a law higher than the state and whose source is the Supreme Being. The belief that human beings created in the image of god, endows human with a worth and dignity. Here, Thomas Aquinas and Grotius defined human rights as a dictate of rights reason’. The dictate of right reason focuses that as human being every person have some rights which is rationale and realistic. All these right have some logical and moral basis.

Natural Law theory led to natural rights theory, and the chief exponent of that theory is John Locke. John Locke argued that “all individuals were endowed by nature with the inherent rights to life, liberty and property which were their own and could not be removed or abrogated by state”. From the Locke’s point of view of natural rights he emphasized on two areas-
 Firstly, the individual is an autonomous being capable of exercising choice and
Secondly, the legitimacy of government depend not only the will of people but also upon the willingness and ability to protect those individuals natural rights.
Rousseau, on the other hand, declared that natural law conferred in alienable sovereignty on the citizens of the state as a whole. Thus, whatever rights were derived from natural law dwelt within the people as a collectivity and could be identified by reference to the general will.
Kant theory based on non-empirical natural law and natural rights tradition suggested that the absolute of moral good, which is identifiable in the exercise of virtuous, will by all rational individuals, to which he calls ‘Categorical imperative’. This operated at three levels:

First, it specifies universal acts of duty on all individuals;
          Second, it provides systematic rules for deterring these duties, and
          Finally, it specifies the relationship between freedom and duties.

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