Final answer:
John Locke was the first to introduce the idea of natural rights that should be protected. Thomas Paine also elaborated on the concept of natural rights. Natural rights have been discussed since antiquity but were fully developed by Enlightenment philosophers.
Step-by-step explanation:
One of the first Enlightenment thinkers to tackle the issue of natural rights was the English philosopher John Locke, who argued that people have fundamental rights to life, liberty, and property. In his influential work of political philosophy, Two Treatises of Government, he argued that all people are born in a state of freedom and that government should exist only by their consent, a principle called popular sovereignty.
Thomas Paine further elaborated on natural rights in his influential work Rights of Man (1791), emphasizing that rights cannot be granted by any charter because this would legally imply they can also be revoked, and under such circumstances, they would be reduced to privileges.
Although natural rights have been discussed since antiquity, it was the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment that developed the modern concept of natural rights, which has been critical to the modern republican government and civil society.