Human rights
Published on Nov 29, 2015
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PRESENTATION OUTLINE
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Human rights are moral principles that set out certain standards of human behaviour, and are regularly protected as legal rights in national and international law.
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They are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being."
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Many of the basic ideas that animated the human rights movement developed in the aftermath of the Second World War and the atrocities of The Holocaust, culminating in the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Paris by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.
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All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
—Article 1 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)[7]
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The true forerunner of human rights discourse was the concept of natural rights which appeared as part of the medieval Natural law tradition that became prominent during the Enlightenment
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Notable philosophers are
John Locke, Francis Hutcheson, and
Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui,
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From this foundation, the modern human rights arguments emerged over the latter half of the twentieth century.
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
FRENCH REVOLUTION
The earliest conceptualization of human rights is credited to ideas about natural rights emanating from natural law.
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Natural law theories base human rights on a "natural" moral, religious or even biological order that is independent of transitory human laws or traditions.
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Socrates and his philosophic heirs, Plato and Aristotle, posited the existence of natural justice or natural right . Of these, Aristotle is often said to be the father of natural law, although evidence for this is due largely to the interpretations of his work by Thomas Aquinas.
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Hugo Grotius based his philosophy of international law on natural law. He wrote that "even the will of an omnipotent being cannot change or abrogate" natural law, which "would maintain its objective validity even if we should assume the impossible, that there is no God or that he does not care for human affairs."
that made natural law no longer dependent on theology.
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17th-century English philosopher John Locke discussed natural rights in his work, identifying them as being "life, liberty, and estate (property)", and argued that such fundamental rights could not be surrendered in the social contract.
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John Locke incorporated natural law into many of his theories and philosophy, especially in Two Treatises of Government. Locke turned Hobbes' prescription around, saying that if the ruler went against natural law and failed to protect "life, liberty, and property," people could justifiably overthrow the existing state and create a new one.
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The Belgian philosopher of law Frank Van Dun is one among those who are elaborating a secular conception of natural law in the liberal tradition. There are also emerging and secular forms of natural law theory that define human rights as derivative of the notion of universal human dignity.
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The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested the existence of a hypothetical social contract where a group of free individuals agree for the sake of preservation to form institutions to govern them. This led to John Locke's theory that a failure of the government to secure rights is a failure which justifies the removal of the government.
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The Golden Rule, or the ethic of reciprocity states that one must do unto others as one would be treated themselves; the principle being that reciprocal recognition and respect of rights ensures that one's own rights will be protected. This principle can be found in all the world's major religions in only slightly differing forms, and was enshrined in the "Declaration Toward a Global Ethic" by the Parliament of the World's Religions in 1993.
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Soviet concept of human rights was different from conceptions prevalent in the West. According to Western legal theory, "it is the individual who is the beneficiary of human rights which are to be asserted against the government", whereas Soviet law declared that state is the source of human rights.
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Crime was determined not as the infraction of law, but as any action which could threaten the Soviet state and society. For example, a desire to make a profit could be interpreted as a counter-revolutionary activity punishable by death
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The philosopher John Finnis argues that human rights are justifiable on the grounds of their instrumental value in creating the necessary conditions for human well-being. Interest theories highlight the duty to respect the rights of other individuals on grounds of self-interest:
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Edmund Burke was an 18th-century philosopher, political theorist and statesman largely associated with the school of conservatism.
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A great deal of Burke’s uneasiness of the Declaration lies in the drafter’s abandonment of the existing establishment.
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He thought that it was arrogant and limiting for the drafters of the Declaration to cast aside traditional notions that had stood the test of time.
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Burke did not deny the existence of natural rights; rather he thought that the a priori reasoning adopted by the drafters produced notions that were too abstract to have application within the framework of society.
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The 18th Century Utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, criticised the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in his text Anarchical Fallacies. He famously asserted that the concept of natural rights was “nonsense upon stilts”. Bentham criticised the Declaration both for the language that it adopted, and the theories it posited, stating; “Look to the letter, you find nonsense; look beyond the letter, you find nothing.”
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for Marx, liberal rights and ideas of justice are premised on the idea that each of us needs protection from other human beings. Therefore liberal rights are rights of separation, designed to protect us from such perceived threats. Freedom on such a view, is freedom from interference. What this view denies is the possibility — according to Marx, the fact — that real freedom is to be found positively in our relations with other people. It is to be found in human community, not in isolation. So insisting on a regime of rights encourages us to view each other in ways which undermine the possibility of the real freedom we may find in human emancipation.
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Alasdair MacIntyre is a Scottish philosopher who has published a number of works in a variety of philosophical fields, including political philosophy, ethics and metaphysics. MacIntyre criticises the concept of human rights in After Virtue and he famously asserts that “there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.”
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