This article gives details about the philosophical and political context where the key terms in philosophy or political philosophy are Natural Law and Natural Rights:
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2021/08/77439/
This essay is part of a week-long series drawn from the Witherspoon Institute’s project on Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism. Click here to read PD Editor-in-Chief R.J. Snell’s introduction to the series.
No public document gives more prominence to the idea of natural law, nor relies more crucially upon natural law as a premise, than the Declaration of Independence. To understand why this is so and what it means for American constitutionalism requires reading the text of the Declaration in its political, historical, and philosophical context.
While the “unalienable rights” said to be self-evidently true are not explicitly called natural rights, the inference is unavoidable: the passage follows immediately after the sentence that explicitly mentions the laws of nature; Jefferson’s earlier draft called the rights “inherent”; and “self-evident truth” is not a bad definition of natural law itself. Moreover, several of the Declaration’s antecedents did refer more explicitly to natural rights.
