PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN RIGHTS

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN RIGHTS

“The philosophy of human rights addresses questions about the existence, content, nature, universality, justification, and legal status of human rights. The strong claims often made on behalf of human rights (for example, that they are universal, inalienable, or exist independently of legal enactment as justified moral norms) have frequently provoked skeptical doubts and countering philosophical defenses... Reflection on these doubts and the responses that can be made to them has become a sub-field of political and legal philosophy with a very substantial literature…Most human rights are claim rights that impose duties or responsibilities on their addressees or duty bearers. The duties associated with human rights often require actions involving respect, protection, facilitation, and provision. Although human rights are usually mandatory…some legal human rights seem to do little more than declare high-priority goals and assign responsibility for their progressive realization… Human rights are plural and come in lists… Human rights are universal… Human rights have high-priority… … Should human rights be defined as inalienable?... Should human rights be defined as minimal rights?... Should human rights be defined as always being or “mirroring” moral rights?... Should human rights be defined in terms of serving some sort of political function?... How Can Human Rights Exist?... Philosophical justifications for human rights differ in how much credibility they attribute to contemporary lists of human rights…Which rights are human rights?” Andrew Fagan, Human Rights, Stamford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  

FUNDAMENTAL PHILOSOPHICAL CLAIM

“The doctrine of human rights rests upon a particularly fundamental philosophical claim: that there exists a rationally identifiable moral order, an order whose legitimacy precedes contingent social and historical conditions and applies to all human beings everywhere and at all times. On this view, moral beliefs and concepts are capable of being objectively validated as fundamentally and universally true. The contemporary doctrine of human rights is one of a number of universalist moral perspectives. The origins and development of the theory of human rights is inextricably tied to the development of moral universalism. The history of the philosophical development of human rights is punctuated by a number of specific moral doctrines which, though not themselves full and adequate expressions of human rights, have nevertheless provided a number of philosophical prerequisites for the contemporary doctrine. These include a view of morality and justice as emanating from some pre-social domain, the identification of which provides the basis for distinguishing between ‘true’ and merely ‘conventional’ moral principles and beliefs. The essential prerequisites for a defense of human rights also include a conception of the individual as the bearer of certain ‘natural’ rights and a particular view of the inherent and equal moral worth of each rational individual…Human rights rest upon moral universalism and the belief in the existence of a truly universal moral community comprising all human beings. Moral universalism posits the existence of rationally identifiable trans-cultural and trans-historical moral truths. The origins of moral universalism within Europe are typically associated with the writings of Aristotle and the Stoics…Moral philosophers remain concerned by the question of the philosophical foundations of human rights…Morality is fundamentally concerned with what ought to be the case…One must not confuse the law with morality, per se…Human rights originate as moral rights. Human rights claim validity everywhere and for everyone, irrespective of whether they have received comprehensive legal recognition, and even irrespective of whether everyone is agreement with the claims and principles of human rights. Thus, one cannot settle the question of the philosophical validity of human rights by appealing to purely empirical observations upon the world. As a moral doctrine, human rights have to be demonstrated to be valid as norms and not facts…Philosophical supporters of human rights are necessarily committed to a form of moral universalism. As moral principles and as a moral doctrine, human rights are considered to be universally valid. However, moral universalism has long been subject to criticism by so-called moral relativists. Moral relativists argue that universally valid moral truths do not exist The principal philosophical foundation of human rights is a belief in the existence of a form of justice valid for all peoples, everywhere. In this form, the contemporary doctrine of human rights has come to occupy center stage in geo-political affairs. The language of human rights is understood and utilized by many peoples in very diverse circumstances. Human rights have become indispensable to the contemporary understanding of how human beings should be treated, by one another and by national and international political bodies. Human rights are best thought of as potential moral guarantees for each human being to lead a minimally good life. The extent to which this aspiration has not been realized represents a gross failure by the contemporary world to institute a morally compelling order based upon human rights. Andrew Fagan, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy  

FROM STOICISM TO HUMAN RIGHTS

Most students of human rights trace the historical origins of the concept back to ancient Greece and Rome, where it was closely tied to the premodern natural law doctrines of Greek Stoicism (the school of philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium, which held that a universal working force pervades all creation and that human conduct therefore should be judged according to, and brought into harmony with, the law of nature). Burns H. Weston,  Human Rights: Concept and Content, in Human Rights in the World Community:  Issues and Action, Third Edition, Richard Pierre Claude and Burns H. Weston, editors.

AN UNSPOKEN PREMISE

An unspoken premise in the numerous discussions now taking place among economists concerning the future of capitalism is that we must accept people as they are and design new rules that will prevent bad results from occurring, given that premise. In the language of economists, preferences of individuals are fixed: the problem is to change the rules of the game so that, when every individual attempts to maximize his welfare given his information, the outcome or equilibrium will be a good one. Indeed, the Nobel prize in 2007 was awarded to three economists (Leonid Hur- wicz, Eric Maskin, and Roger Myerson) who constructed theories which characterize exactly which outcomes (or more generally, welfare) can be implemented through some set of rules, regardless of what the preferences of individuals may be. The variable in this theory is the set of rules, and the objective is to achieve, by clever choice of these rules, an outcome deemed to be desirable in the sense that it appropriately balances the welfare of all individuals…I envision a sequential and incremental process, whereby increased social insurance generates a change in citizen preferences in a solidaristic direction, which then induces still more social insurance through the democratic process. This is the process, I conjecture, that brought Europe, and especially northern Europe, to where it is today, where countries have a significantly more egalitarian distribution of final income than in the United States, and yet where labor productivity remains approximately as high as it is here. John E. Roemer, Changing the Social Ethos is the Key, 2009. http://gesd.free.fr/roemer9.pdf