... blind to man's own imperfections. "That men are entitled to make certain claims by virtue simply of their common humanity has been equally passionately defended and vehemently denied."2 H. L. A. Hart once asserted that "if there are any moral rights at all, it follows that there is at least one natural right, the equal right of all men to be free."3 And the proposition that all men have natural rights or rights as human beings is found explicitly in the theories of Thomas Aquinas and John Locke, implicitly in the moral and political philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and at least problematic in the writings of Thomas Hobbes. At the level of practise, it is expressed not only in the rhetoric but in the constitutional innovations of the American and French Revolutions, stating that "the end in view of every political association is the preservation of the natural ...

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