What is the difference between natural and civil rights?

Thomas Paine, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Thomas Paine answers

Natural rights are those that belong to a man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the rights of the mind, and all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness that do no injury to the natural rights of others.¹ Civil rights belong to him in right of his being a member of society, and every one of them has for its foundation some natural right already in the individual, but one whose enjoyment his single power is not always equal to.

Security and protection are of this kind.¹ The line between them is drawn by power. Where the power to execute is as perfect in the individual as the right itself, he keeps the right: thinking, speaking, forming and giving opinions, the rights I call rights of personal competency.² Religion is one of these, and no one has any business taking it from him.

But where the right is perfect and the power is defective, as in personal protection and the acquiring and holding of property, it answers not his purpose to hold it alone.² A man has a natural right to judge in his own cause. What avails it him to judge if he cannot redress? So he deposits that right in the common stock and takes the arm of society in preference and in addition to his own.³

Look at redress of injury. A man has a natural right to redress himself when injured, but exercised as a natural right it is dangerous to society, because it makes him judge in his own cause, and it may leave him too weak to act at all. The civil right of appeal to public justice is the substitute, and it makes him stronger than the natural one and less dangerous.⁴

Two conclusions follow. Every civil right grows out of a natural right; it is a natural right exchanged. And civil power, properly considered, is the aggregate of that class of natural rights which becomes defective in the individual, and which, collected to a focus, becomes competent to the purpose of every one.³ Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was, nor to have fewer rights, but to have those rights better secured.⁵

Society grants him nothing. Every man is a proprietor in it and draws on the capital as a matter of right.³ I once set this out to Mr. Jefferson by supposing twenty strangers meeting in a country not before inhabited. Each is sovereign in his own right, and each is exposed to the other nineteen. They exchange that quantity of danger for so much protection, and keep what they can exercise perfectly while surrendering what they cannot.⁶

It does not follow that the more natural rights of every kind we give up the more security we possess. If we resign the first class, those where right and power are equal in the individual, we may suffer much by the exchange, for there they ought to rest.⁶

Sources

1. Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others.

   The Writings of Thomas Paine Vol 2, 1779-1792

2. Of the first kind are the rights of thinking, speaking, forming and giving opinions, and perhaps all those which can be fully exercised by the individual without the aid of exterior assistance — or in other words, rights of personal competency — Of the second kind are those of personal protection of acquiring and possessing property, in the exercise of which the individual natural power is less than the natural right.

   Letters 1772-1808 Not in Conway

3. Having drawn this line they agree to retain individually the first Class of Rights or those of personal competency; and to detach from their personal possession the second Class, or those of defective power and to accept in lieu thereof a right to the whole power produced by a condensation of all the parts.

   Letters 1772-1808 Not in Conway

4. A man has a natural right to redress himself whenever he is injured, but the full exercise of this, as a natural right, would be dange

   The Writings of Thomas Paine Vol 2, 1779-1792

5. Man did not enter into society to become zvorse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured. His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights.

   The Writings of Thomas Paine Vol 2, 1779-1792

6. They would begin by distinguishing between those rights they could individually exercise fully and perfectly and those they could not.

   Letters 1772-1808 Not in Conway