Postscript to A Philosophical History of Rights Gary Herbert The historical development of the concept of rights has followed the philo- sophical history of our understanding of nature and has shared its fate. The ancient teleological idea of nature experienced a slow demise, giving way eventually to the modern nonteleological idea of nature found in seventeenth- century mathematical physics. Nature lost its status as the domain to which one could refer for fixed patterns of moral and natural excellence and be- came, instead, a domain of nonmoral and mechanical intelligibility. The idea of right suffered the same slow demise as ancient nature, beginning as the ancient idea of what objectively is right, splitting itself up eventually, in the early modern era, into (1) subjective right, the natural, non-moral rights--or powers--of the individual subject, and (2) what remained of objective right itself, now conceived as whatever the laws require or, more abstractly, what- ever moral obligation or the commands of God demand of one. Morality for seventeenth century philosophers was knowable only as legality. Of course, modern subjective right was, at the outset at least, also objective, in the sense that it was part of the nature of things and not merely the arbitrary offspring of human thinking and feeling about things. For Thomas Hobbes, subjective (individual) rights retained their unsociable objectivity by being an expression of the natural conatus of individuals, an extension of the natural desire for sur- vival, "Jbund even in the emb~o. ''~ Rights, according to Hobbes, are not moral or political fictions. Found "even in the embryo," they are scientifically verifiable truths pertaining to all people everywhere. Most importantly, there is nothing moral about them. Good people and bad people alike possess rights. Hobbesian natural rights, conceived as the liberty of persons otherwise governed by principles of rational self-interest, but unbound by moral or divine law, drove Hobbesian individuals unavoidably into a war of each against all. The two centuries of political philosophy following Hobbes were occu- pied, in large part, with locating ways by which natural rights might naturally mediate themselves and produce peace. For Hobbes, the natural mediation of natural right could be achieved only when and where individuals could be made to recognize the reasonableness (the self-interested character) of politi- cal submission to an absolute sovereign authority. The frightening prospect of violent death for those who remain in the unmediated liberty of the natural condition would transform consistently self-interested individuals into para-