William Ernest Hocking - Rights Quotes

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It is right, or absolute right, that an individual should develop the powers that are in him. He may be said to have a "natural right" to become what he is capable of becoming. This is his only natural right.

William Ernest Hocking
Without good-will, no man has any presumptive right, except the right or opportunity to change his will, so long as there is hope of it.

William Ernest Hocking
Law deals not with actual individuals, but with individuals artificially defined. We cannot say that law-makers are under an illusion to the effect that all men are equal. They do not even suppose them all alike in being reasonable, or in being well informed about the law, or in being morally sensitive about their own rights or the rights of others. Law-makers have probably never been blind about the conspicuous facts of human difference. Nevertheless, the law in every community — and not alone in modern communities — proposes to treat certain large groups of individuals as were alike "before the law."

William Ernest Hocking
Wherever moral ambition exists, there right exists.
And moral ambition itself must be presumed present in subconsciousness, even when the conscious self seems to reject it, so long as society has resources for bringing it into action; in much the same way that the life-saver presumes life to exist in the drowned man until he has exhausted his resources for recovering respiration.

William Ernest Hocking
Principle I : Legal rights are presumptive rights.

William Ernest Hocking
For those who have only to obey, law is what the sovereign commands. For the sovereign, in the throes of deciding what he ought to command, this view of law is singularly empty of light and leading. In the dispersed sovereignty of modern states, and especially in times of rapid social change, law must look to the future as well as to history and precedent, and to what is possible and right as well as to what is actual.

William Ernest Hocking
Principle III : Presumptive rights are the conditions under which individual powers normally develop.

William Ernest Hocking