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Why Human Rights Are Called Human Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2014

Alan Sussman
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Extract

The title of this essay is rather ambitious and the space available is hardly sufficient to examine two words of almost limitless expanse—“human rights”—whether standing alone or in tandem. This requires that I begin with (and remained disciplined by) what a teacher of mine, Leo Strauss, called “low facts.” My low facts are these: We call ourselves humans because we have certain characteristics that define our nature. We are social and political animals, as Aristotle noted, and possess attributes not shared by other animals. The ancients noted this, of course, when they defined our principal behavioral and cognitive distinction from the rest of the natural world as the faculty of speech. The Greek word for this, logos, means much more than speech, as it connotes word and reason and, in the more common understanding, talking and writing, praising and criticizing, persuading and reading. While other animals communicate by making sounds of attraction or warning, leaving smells, and so on, none read newspapers, make speeches, publish their memoirs, or write poetry.

Type
Essays
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , Summer 2014 , pp. 171 - 182
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2014 

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References

NOTES

1 Aristotle, Politics, bk. 1, ch. 2, 1253a.

2 “One cannot affirm the equality of humans or the universality of human rights unless one acknowledges that there is something about humans which distinguishes them from animals.” Finnis, John, “Natural Law: The Classical Tradition,” in Coleman, Jules L., Himma, Kenneth Einar, and Shapiro, Scott J., eds., Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 4Google Scholar.

3 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 1, ch. 1 and 2, 1094a.

4 Ibid., ch. 7, 1097a–1097b.

5 Plato, Republic, bk. 2, 368(e)–369(b); bk. 4, 435(b) and (c).

6 Homer, The Odyssey, bk. 12, 180–217. See Elster, Jon, Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) pp. 36Google Scholar, et seq.

7 Cicero, Republic, bk. 2, sec. 39 and 59.

8 “Law is nature's gift to men. We must discover first what unites men, then we can discover the origin of law.” Cicero, Laws, bk. 1, sec. 5.

9 Cicero, Republic, bk. 1, sec. 60.

10 Cicero, Laws, bk. 1, sec. 13.

11 Ibid., sec. 7

12 Ibid., bk. 2, sec. 16. In “Scipio's Dream,” found at the end of Republic, Cicero writes, “Just as the god, who moves the universe . . . is eternal, so the soul which moves the frail body is eternal too.” Cicero, Republic, bk. 6, sec. 9–29.

13 Foot, Philippa, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 See the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948, art. 3, 4, 9, and 25.

15 See, e.g., Fuller, Lon, “Positivism and Fidelity to Law—A Reply to Professor Hart,” Harvard Law Review 71, no. 4 (1958), pp. 630–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, being a response to Hart, H. L. A., “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals,” Harvard Law Review 71, no. 4 (1958), pp. 593–629CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The original adumbration is from Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, bk. 1, § 5, explored by Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. 1, q. 96, art. 4, and repeated famously by Martin Luther King in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Liberation (June 1963).

16 UN General Assembly, Resolution 177, “Formulation of the Principles Recommended in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and Judgment of the Tribunal,” November 21, 1947.

17 Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Prolegomena 16–17.

18 Ibid., Prolegomena 17 and 22–23.

19 Ibid., bk. 1, ch. 1, sec. 4.

20 Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).

21 Grotius, De Jure, bk. 3, ch. 4.

22 Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu, ICTR-96-4-T.

23 In a rhetorical slight he also substituted “law of nature” for “natural law,” thus allowing him to consider what is natural rather than what is required by reason as properly understood by classical and medieval political philosophy.

24 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ch. 13.

25 Ibid., ch. 14, 15, and 18.

26 Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953) p. 181Google Scholar.

27 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 14.

28 Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

29 Maine, Henry, Ancient Law (London: J. Murray, 1861)Google Scholar, ch. 5. But see Versteeg, J. Russell, “From Status to Contract: A Contextual Analysis of Maine's Famous Dictum,” Whittier Law Review 10, no. 4 (1988–1989), pp. 669–81Google Scholar.

30 That is, by the terms demanded by Locke a century earlier. “No government can have a right to obedience from a people who have not freely consented to it.” John Locke, Second Treatise, (1690), 2.192.

31 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), 4.433.

32 See McCloskey, Mary, “Kant's Kingdom of Ends,” Philosophy 51, no. 198 (1976), p. 391CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “The Four Freedoms” (speech), State of the Union address to Congress, Washington, D.C., January 6, 1941, www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrthefourfreedoms.htm.

34 “Statement on Human Rights,” American Anthropologist, New Series 49, no. 4, pt. 1 (1947), pp. 539–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 American Anthropological Association, Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights Committee for Human Rights American Anthropological Association (adopted June 1999).

36 Ignatieff, Michael, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 55–56Google Scholar.

37 Badiou, Alain, In Praise of Love (New York: The New Press, 2013), p. 102Google Scholar.

38 Ibid., p. 17. See also Nussbaum, Martha, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

39 Rawls uses the term “comprehensive” to mean religious and philosophical systems which cover “all recognized values and virtues within . . . one scheme of thought.” In Rawls, John, “The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 17, no. 4 (1988), p. 253Google Scholar.