Human Rights - Stoicism And Roman Jurisprudence, Christianity And Medieval Contributions, Modern Natural Rights, The Reformation And Its Aftermath
political idea sometimes moral
The idea of human rights posits that human beings, regardless of extrinsic differences in circumstance (nationality, class, religion) or physical condition (race, gender, age), possess a basic and absolute dignity that must be respected by governments and other people. Sometimes these rights claims have been grounded in systems of positive law, sometimes in conceptions of human nature or divine creation. Most scholars who study moral and political ideas on a global basis agree that the concept of human rights is Western in origin, although it has spread throughout the world in recent times. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and other proclamations that have followed from it establish that such rights pertain across the globe regardless of cultural, religious, social, or political differences. In this sense, the very idea of human rights stands logically opposed to moral relativism of any sort. Depending on one's perspective, this hallmark of rights is either a shortcoming or an advantage.
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The thinking of Cicero and others influenced by the Stoics led to what might be considered the earliest coherent expression of the language of human rights. The language of ius ("right") emerged quite soon after the foundation of the Roman Republic, mainly to denote a form of divine judgment. In later Roman times, ius constituted the basis of valid or obligatory Roman law, such that …
Roman legal concepts and terminology carried over into the Christian era in Europe, albeit with important changes and additions. Medieval canon (church) lawyers and Scholastic philosophers insisted that God endowed human beings with basic rights regarding themselves and those goods they required to preserve their divinely created lives. Some recent scholars, most notably Brian Tierney (1997), have…
Arguably, the idea of human rights culminated in the natural rights theories that characterize modern legal and political thought. The idea of natural rights may be contrasted with earlier teachings about natural law that were grounded in more robust principles of reason and natural or divine teleology. Many important thinkers of early modern Europe subscribed to a version of natural law without e…
At nearly the same time that Las Casas was grappling with Spanish imperialism, the idea of human rights also received refinement and application in the context of the religious Reformation. On the Protestant side, rights theory became a major element of late-sixteenth-century Huguenot efforts to ground their justification of resistance to governments that imposed doctrinal conformity on religious …
Selden's best-known adherent was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who developed the insights of the former into a powerful individualist theory of human rights. In his major works, culminating in Leviathan (1651), Hobbes ascribed to all human
beings natural liberty as well as equality, on the basis of which they are licensed to undertake whatever actions might be necessary to preserve the…
Locke's theory, then, stated an integrated position that drew on many of the earlier strands of human rights thought. In turn, the eighteenth century would see the extension, refinement, and, in some respects, radicalization of the fundamentals of the Lockean doctrine. Locke's language was adopted, for instance, by both theorists and polemicists who sought to halt Europe's com…
The spread of rights language in political discourse was countered at the dawn of the nineteenth century by criticisms of the intellectual foundations of rights theory. Most famously, the major exponent of the utilitarian school, Jeremy Bentham
(1748–1832), denounced the doctrine of natural rights as "simply nonsense," adding that the conjunction of natural and inalienable ri…
Despite the critiques of philosophers and activists, the idea of human rights remains one of the most compelling, salient, and popular political doctrines of recent times. Impetus was given to this by the 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the many other attendant international and multinational agreements that have reinforced the notion that human beings as morally dignified pers…
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edited by J. G. A. Pocock. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts. Vol. 2: Ethics and Political Philosophy, edited by Arthur S. McGrade, John Kilcullen, and Matthew Kempshall. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On Duties. edited by M. T. Griffin and E. M.…
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