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Against Human Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

John O. Nelson
John O. Nelson
Affiliation:
University of Colorado
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Extract

Let me first explain what I am not attacking in this paper. I am not attacking, for instance, the right of free speech or any of the other specific rights listed in the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights or the United Nations' Charter. I am, rather, attacking any specific right's being called a ‘human right’. I mean to show that any such designation is not only fraudulent but, in case anyone might want to say that there can be noble lies, grossly wicked, amounting indeed to genocide.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 65 , Issue 253 , July 1990 , pp. 341 - 348
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1990

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References

1 See, Machan, Tibor, ‘Towards a Theory of Individual Human Rights’, The New Scholasticism, 51, No. 1 (Winter, 1987).Google Scholar

2 While Machan refers (op. cit., 41, 76) to human beings as ‘rational animals’ no references to Man's animality occur, as they do in Aristotle's theory of the moral virtues, in Machan's. To all intents and purposes, therefore, Machan (like Ayn Rand before him) treats Man as simply rational being.

3 Machan, , op. cit., 43, 52.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., 76–77.

5 Ibid., 78.

6 Benedict, Ruth, Patterns of Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Riverside Press, 1934), see: 168Google Scholar, ‘The good man [qua Dobuan] is the one who has… thieved, killed children, cheated whenever he dared…; 172, ‘…in the extremity of humiliation the Dobuan projects upon himself and his possessions the maliciousness and the will to destroy which are required in all his institutions…’.