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Human Rights Reaffirmed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Tibor R. Machan
Tibor R. Machan
Affiliation:
Auburn University
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Extract

There have been a number of attacks on the idea of human rights recently, both in the course of political and diplomatic encounters across the globe, as well as in the more systematic literature of political philosophy. These attacks do not always distinguish between the Lockean, negative and the more recent positive rights traditions. For example, at the 1993 summer conference on Human Rights in Vienna, Austria, many diplomats from different regions of the world raised such questions as 'When we speak of human rights, are these conditions that everyone everywhere ought to enjoy?’Is it perhaps the case that human rights are one thing for people in one part of the globe and another for those in another part?' These questions were raised in large part about the rights spelled out in the United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights, including both (so called) negative and positive rights–e.g., the rights to freedom of expression and to public education, respectively.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 69 , Issue 270 , October 1994 , pp. 479 - 490
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1994

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References

1 See, Machan, Tibor R., ‘Some Recent Work in Human Rights Theory’Google Scholar and Rex, Martin and Nickel, James W. ‘Recent Work on the Concept of Rights,’ in Lucey, Kenneth G., (ed.), Recent Work in Philosophy (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983), for surveys of such effort between the 1940s and 1980s in the Anglo-American philosophical community.Google Scholar

2 Leo, StraussNatural Right and History, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970).Google Scholar

3 E.g., Richard, Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 31, 177Google Scholar. John, Gray, Post Liberalism (London: Routledge 1993).Google Scholar

4 E.g., Ernest van, den Haag, ‘Against Natural Rights.’ Policy Review, No. 23 (Winter 1983), 143–175.Google Scholar

5 E.g., Nelson, John O., ‘Against Human Rights,’ Philosophy, 65, (1990), 341–348.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 John, Gray, Liberalism (Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minneapolis Press, 1986),.43.Google Scholar

7 John, Gray, Liberalisms (London: Routledge, 1989), 258. This claim is akin to that offered by Nelson, to be examined shortly.Google Scholar

8 Ibid.

9 For example, Rorty, op. cit.Google Scholar

10 Op. cit., Nelson, ‘Against Human Rights’, 344.Google Scholar

11 This is Hart′s phase, H. L. A., attributed to Locke without reference in ‘Are There Any Natural Rights? Philosophical Review, Vol. 64 (1955), 175–91.Google Scholar

12 Sperry, Roger W., ’Changing Concepts of Consciousness and Free Will,’ Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Vol. 9 (Autumn 1976), 9–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.See, also, Machan, Tibor R., ‘Applied Ethics and Free Will, Some Untoward Results of Independence,’ The Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 10(1993), 59–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Werner, Jaeger, Aristotle (Oxford University Press, 1934), 152.Google Scholar

14 David, Ross, Aristotle (Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1964), 201Google Scholar

15 See, e.g. op. cit., Sperry, ‘Changing Concepts of Consciousness and Free Will’Google Scholar. See, also, Huw, Price, ‘A neglected Route to Realism about quantum mechanics’, Mind, vol. 103 (July 1994), 303–336.Google Scholar

16 Laszlo, Versenyi, ‘Virtue as a Self-Directed Art’, The Personalist, Vol. 53 (Summer 1972), 282.Google Scholar

17 Op. cit., Nelson, 344.Google Scholar

18 Some of the material in this paper is drawn from my ‘Justice, Self and Natural Rights’, in James, Sterba, Morality and Social Injustice (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1994).Google Scholar