Pang Ying:Hello, I’m Pang Ying. Welcome to Think Like a Debater, Episode 28. Today’s motion is: Are rights endowed by human beings or by nature? First, Zhan Qingyun argues that rights are human-made.

Zhan Qingyun:Thank you. I need to define some basic concepts first, lest Ms. Pang’s eloquence lead everyone astray.

I’ll begin by recommending The Study of a Bad World, a political-philosophy book I recently found interesting, accessible, and surprisingly lively despite its abstract-sounding title.

The Study of a Bad World, as its name suggests.Philosophers imagine ideal worlds, but reality is bad. Good philosophy must respond to that world: starting from the worst assumptions about human nature, it should use political institutions to make life as good as possible. That is my central claim.

Traditional political philosophy and ethics emphasized duties and virtues. Traditional rule of law largely meant criminal law and the punishment for wrongdoing. Rights were rarely discussed. The concepts of rights, freedom, and the individual emerged together through modernization.

Many ideas that follow come from this book. It says the individual was created through several stages: Christianity’s pure human being, humanism’s self-directed person replacing God with humanity, capitalism’s economic person, and the Enlightenment’s rational person.

Natural rights have ancient roots in Greek philosophy and medieval theology. What we now call natural human rights, however, comes mainly from liberalism and the Enlightenment, especially Hobbes and Locke.

Hobbes made a crucial move. He imagined humanity in a state of nature filled with rivalry, distrust, suspicion, and killing, where self-preservation was everyone’s primary desire. This made the individual, and the right arising from self-preservation, the starting point of later political philosophy.

Hobbes and Locke’s theory had enormous influence and appears in formal legal texts, most famously the U.S. Declaration of Independence and France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man. The American text displays several basic features.