A nineteenth-century legal theory grounded rights in unequal natural capacities.

Evidence

According to Lorimer’s natural law theory, human capacities (or ‘gifts of Providence’) were unequally distributed, and the role of law, in declaring rights, was to recognise and vindicate this underlying factual inequality; ‘to create rights’, he wrote, ‘is as impossible as to create the individual in whom they inhere, to add a cubit to his stature, or to raise him from the dead; and to declare rights in excess of his faculties is simply to declare what is not’. The consequence of this position was that ‘higher’ races had more rights, while, within a state, the most ‘gifted’ and educated individuals had more rights than the poor. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 80

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the argument that rights discourse has never been purely egalitarian and can underwrite hierarchy — relevant to the ethics-of-markets reading on how rights language legitimates stratification. — connects to: The eighteenth century equated individuality with freedom and assumed natural human equality — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 650
• SEED: A possible essay angle: how ‘capacity-based’ rights theories recur in debates over who deserves rights, from Lorimer to contemporary arguments against universal welfare.

Broader Connections

• The eighteenth century equated individuality with freedom and assumed natural human equality #contradicts (0.85) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 650