This chapter examines the earliest natural rights theories in order to analyse philosophical connections between natural and human rights, concerning: scepticism, metaphysical dualism, and the authority of rights. First, the chapter studies Albert the Great’s principles of right and how he understood nature to be reason. Next, analysis of the main tenets of Henry of Ghent’s metaphysics, and his exposition of the soul’s property over one’s body, show that Neoplatonist dualism was fundamental in the development of the first natural rights theories. The philosophical solution to the poverty controversy, of human beings’ natural rights to use material goods, that Hervaeus Natalis proposed became the law of the Church when the Pope incorporate it in the bull, Cum inter nonnullos (1323). Hervaeus continued the metaphysical dualism of Henry and argued that natural rights endowed reality with normativity and hence authority. The chapter concludes by relating this intellectual history to contemporary rights theories. Natural and human rights are identified as a form of public reason that sometimes assists, other times substitutes for, individual right reason and judgement about morality.

Chapter 5 concerns the free will debate in the early fourteenth century. It thoroughly discusses the Franciscans Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, who make a sharp distinction between will and nature, that is, between a free power or cause that controls its act and one whose act is determined by external circumstances. Scotus and Ockham make the will more independent from a cognized good than previous thinkers. Using unedited texts, the chapter also presents what may well be the strongest statement of intellectualism at the time, by John of Pouilly, who builds on Godfrey of Fontaines to explain why, although our choices are moved by the cognized object, we control our choices. More briefly, the Dominicans Hervaeus Natalis and Durand of St. Pourçain are considered, whose general approach resembles Pouilly’s. As a thinker developing an intermediary theory, the chapter studies Peter Auriol, according to whom the will controls directly which judgment considered during deliberation becomes the final judgment that causes one’s choice. The dividing issue among these thinkers is, at bottom, whether the will controls its acts directly or only by means of deliberation.