ABSTRACT
Apart from “the” and “of,” every word in the title of this chapter is bound to raise eyebrows. Many contemporary moral and political theorists would deny that there are any such things as “rights,” at least apart from (what they would consider) the purely legal fi ctions created by framers of constitutions and legislators. Of those who do affi rm their existence, many would deny that rights can be given a theoretical “foundation.” And among those who would allow for such a foundation, few would hold that it can be found in “nature” and fewer still that it could be in any sense “metaphysical.” All the same, my position is that there are such things as rights, and that their foundation lies not in convention but in the metaphysics of human nature. If this view sounds reactionary, the case I would make in its defense is bound to sound even more so, resting as it does on a broadly Aristotelian-Thomistic-Scholastic approach to moral philosophy. What follows is an outline of that case. In the course of making it, I will indicate how certain modern, alternative defenses of natural rights have failed to do the job, and thus why the more traditional approach I advocate is necessary as well as suffi cient to do it.
