QuestionsWhat is a just society?Rights do not come from our forefathers
What is a just society?Natural rights

Rights do not come from our forefathers

Mary Wollstonecraft 1759 · 1797Women share the same reason: educate them accordingly.
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What it claims

The rights of men rest on reason. Everyone receives them at birth as a rational being, from God and not from their forefathers, and no tradition can abolish them.

Why

If age alone made a custom just, the slave trade would be just: rights must therefore come from reason.

In short

"Rights do not come from our forefathers" is an argument by Mary Wollstonecraft (Rights of Men (reply to Burke, 1790)) on the question "What is a just society?" (answer: natural rights). Its claim: The rights of men rest on reason. Everyone receives them at birth as a rational being, from God and not from their forefathers, and no tradition can abolish them. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3). AskPhilosophy presents 2 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Rights of Men (reply to Burke, 1790)
Valid with an implicit premise

In 1790 Edmund Burke attacked the French Revolution: the English, he said, hold their liberties from their forefathers, as an inheritance, not from abstract "rights of man". Less than a month later, Wollstonecraft published the first reply. Her method: take reverence for tradition seriously and show where it leads.

P1If the age of a custom ("prescription") were enough to make it just, the slave trade would be just and should never be abolished, since our forefathers authorised it.
P2Yet the slave trade is not just: it is a traffic that outrages reason and religion.
P3 · implicit premiseRights can have only two foundations: inherited custom, or reason.
Therefore the rights of men rest on reason. Everyone receives them at birth as a rational being, from God and not from their forefathers, and no tradition can abolish them.

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 P3, the computer finds a situation where custom is not enough (the slave trade proves it) and where rights do not rest on reason alone either: they could come from something else, for instance enacted law or utility.
Valid with P3. The first two premises only show that custom is not enough. To conclude that reason grounds rights, one must assume there is no third possibility. That is the weak point: Burke defends precisely a third way, the accumulated experience of generations, carefully corrected.
Analogy. "We have always done it this way" does not prove we do it right: for centuries, doctors bled their patients. Something other than habit is needed to judge a practice.

Objections

2

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

Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France) 1790 · attacks premise 3

For Burke, a custom is not valuable merely because it is old: inherited institutions hold the experience of many generations, safer than the reason of one individual or one assembly. So there is a third way between frozen custom and abstract reason: reform, but carefully, starting from what exists. "A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation."

Wollstonecraft replies
Wollstonecraft
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.
The debate goes on (our summary) Burke, moreover, did not support the slave trade: around 1780 he had drafted a plan to abolish it gradually ("Sketch of a Negro Code"), which shows one can reform in the name of experience without starting from scratch. The following years, with the Terror (1793-1794), seemed to many readers to prove Burke right: rights proclaimed in the name of reason did not prevent violence. His defenders see it as proof that rights without tested institutions to protect them remain fragile. Wollstonecraft's supporters answer that the slave trade, for its part, was abolished only in the name of principles and against tradition.
Bentham (natural rights, "nonsense upon stilts") 1816 · attacks premise 3

There is a third way: rights come neither from our forefathers nor from an eternal reason, but from laws. A right is what the law guarantees, and a good law is one that produces the most happiness. "Natural and imprescriptible" rights are rhetorical nonsense. Bentham wrote this around 1795 against the French Declaration; the text appeared only in 1816.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1816, after the author's death (1797).
The debate goes on (our summary) Wollstonecraft died in 1797, and Bentham's text appeared only in 1816. For her, these rights come from God, who made man rational: that is precisely the foundation Bentham rejects. The debate between natural rights (prior to laws) and rights created by laws continues today.