These days we have the shelter that regulates year-round, wherever we live, to the point we can do without clothing if we opted not to wear it.
Canadians, among others, may readily embrace the rhetoric of human rights. But we do need to ask whether these human rights are really civil rights, in the sense of belonging to a particular conception of society. By studying the theoretical under-pinning of human rights, as well as their operation in the context of specific practical rights issues, we may come to a fuller appreciation of the extent to which human rights depend upon deliberate (although often obscured) policy choices.
The earliest direct precursor to human rights might be found in the notions of `natural right' developed by classical Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle, but this concept was more fully developed by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica. For several centuries Aquinas' conception held sway: there were goods or behaviours that were naturally right (or wrong) because God ordained it so. What was naturally right could be ascertained by humans by `right reason' - thinking properly. Hugo Grotius further expanded on this notion in De jure belli et paci, where he propounded the immutability of what is naturally right and wrong: