QuestionsWhat is a just society?Rights come from birth, not from governments
What is a just society?Natural rights

Rights come from birth, not from governments

The rights of man; the rights of the living against the authority of the dead

Thomas Paine 1737 · 1809The rights of man come from his birth, not from a king, and every generation has the same rights as the one before.
See profile
What it claims

A government is legitimate only if it guarantees everyone's natural rights, and no one, not even an ancient charter, can take them from later generations. "The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man."

Why

History proves nothing, there is always a contrary custom; at the origin all men are born equal, with the same natural rights.

The same idea through history
John Locke1689Before any state, reason teaches that no one ought to harm another's life, health, liberty or possessions. Paine takes up the idea of rights prior to government, but ties it to the equal birth of every generation.
Thomas Jefferson1776The Declaration of Independence, drafted by Jefferson, holds that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Rights come before government, which exists to secure them.
Gilbert du Motier, marquis de La Fayette1789The draft Declaration of Rights La Fayette presented on 11 July 1789, then the Declaration voted in August: "the aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man". Paine translates it in his book.
Thomas Paine1791
In short

"Rights come from birth, not from governments" is an argument by Thomas Paine (Rights of Man, 1791 (reply to Burke), 1791) on the question "What is a just society?" (answer: natural rights). Its claim: A government is legitimate only if it guarantees everyone's natural rights, and no one, not even an ancient charter, can take them from later generations. "The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man.". According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P2). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 4 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Rights of Man, 1791 (reply to Burke)
Valid with an implicit premise

In 1790 Edmund Burke attacked the French Revolution: the English, he said, hold their liberties from their ancestors, as an inheritance. Thomas Paine, who had helped the American revolution, replied the next year. If we go far enough back in history, he says, we reach man as he came from the hand of his Maker: all equal. Rights come from there, not from a king or a parliament. And every generation has the same rights as the one before, so none can decide forever in place of those that follow.

P1Historical precedents prove nothing: going back in time, one always finds contrary customs, one authority against another.
P2 · implicit premiseRights can have only two foundations: historical precedents, or the common origin of man.
P3At the origin, all men were born equal and with an equal natural right. Every child born into the world derives his existence from God, and the world is as new to him as it was to the first man.
P4So every generation has the same rights as those before it. None can bind the next ones to live under its rules forever: the living count, not the dead.
P5Natural rights belong to man by the mere fact that he exists. He enters society not to have fewer rights, but to have them better secured: society grants him nothing, and every civil right is a natural right exchanged for protection.
P6A government has a right to arise only from a compact among individuals, each in his own personal and sovereign right.
Therefore a government is legitimate only if it guarantees everyone's natural rights, and no one, not even an ancient charter, can take them from later generations. "The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man."

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P2, the computer finds a case where precedents prove nothing and where man's origin does not ground rights either: they might come from law or from utility.
The argument is valid with the hidden premise P2. Without it, we would only know that precedents are not enough, not that man's origin grounds rights: other possibilities remain (utility, enacted law, the careful experience Burke defends). This is also what critics aim at: some deny that rights exist before any law, others that abstract rights really protect anyone.
Analogy. Does a club rule voted two hundred years ago bind today's members? For Paine, no: the living members decide, and no club has the right to take from them what the first members had themselves.

Objections

4

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Edmund Burke 1790 · attacks premise 1

The English do not hold their liberties from abstract rights: since Magna Carta they have claimed them as an inheritance received from their ancestors and to be handed down to their descendants, without reference to any more general right. This inheritance keeps the Constitution united. Old institutions hold the experience of many generations, safer than one man's reason.

Paine replies
Thomas Paine 1791 · Paine's reply
The Parliament of 1688 had the right to act for itself and its constituents. But it also set up, by assumption, the right to bind posterity to the end of time. No generation has this right or this power: every age must be as free to act for itself as those before it. Paine speaks of "the vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave".
Mary Wollstonecraft 1790
The only valuable inheritance our forefathers could bequeath is their experience. But we can use it only once we have gained our own, and it serves as a lighthouse warning of rocks, not as a finger-post pointing the road at every turning.
see the argument
Where the debate stands (our summary)Deep disagreement: does the accumulated experience of a tradition serve as a guarantee of liberties (Burke), or only the equal freedom of the living (Paine)? Both positions still have defenders. (Our summary.)
Edmund Burke 1790 · attacks premise 5

Natural rights may exist without government, and even in greater clearness and abstract perfection. But their abstract perfection is their practical defect: by having a right to everything, people want everything. Government is a means of meeting human needs, and what matters is how to meet them, not the discussion of an abstract right.

Paine replies
Thomas Paine 1791 · Paine's reply
For Paine, the rights an individual cannot enforce alone, for lack of power, he pools: he deposits with society the right to judge his own cause, because judging without the power to redress is of no use to him. He keeps those he can exercise himself, such as the rights of the mind. Society grants him nothing: every civil right is a natural right exchanged.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Burke and Paine agree that government must meet needs. They differ on the role of rights: a test every power must respect (Paine), or an idea too abstract to guide concrete politics (Burke). (Our summary.)
Jeremy Bentham 1795 · attacks premise 2

There are no natural rights, that is, rights prior to the establishment of government: the expression is merely figurative. A right is what the law guarantees. Wishing that a right existed is not having it: "hunger is not bread". "Natural and imprescriptible rights" are rhetorical nonsense, "nonsense upon stilts". Bentham wrote this around 1795 against the French Declaration; the text appeared only in 1816 (in French) and 1843 (in English).

a defender replies
No reply possible: objection raised in 1795, after the author's death (1809).
H
H. L. A. Hart defender of the argument · 1955
Hart defends the idea of a natural right: if there are any moral rights at all, there must be at least one natural right, the equal right of all men to be free. This right is not created or conferred by any voluntary action of men, and it belongs to all who are capable of choice.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Deep disagreement: do rights exist before the law, or only when the law guarantees them? The debate is still open in legal philosophy. (Our summary.)
Karl Marx 1844 · attacks the conclusion

The so-called rights of man, as distinct from the rights of the citizen, are nothing but the rights of a member of civil society, that is, of egoistic man, separated from other men and from the community. Marx cites article 2 of the 1793 Constitution: liberty, equality, security, property. For Marx, the right to liberty rests on the separation of man from man, and its practical application is the right to private property.

a defender replies
No reply possible: objection raised in 1844, after the author's death (1809).
C
Claude Lefort defender of the argument · 1980
Lefort argues that Marx is wrong to reduce the rights of man to bourgeois egoism. For him, they open a space where power can be contested and where anyone can demand new rights: despising them takes from the oppressed the very tool of their struggle.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Are the rights of man a mask for bourgeois interest or the tool of every struggle against oppression? The debate is not settled; both readings have defenders today. (Our summary.)