Grounding Human Rights in Human Nature

Grounding Human Rights in Human Nature PDF Author: Szymon Mazurkiewicz
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031307348
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
What does it mean that human rights derive from human dignity? And what is the foundation of human dignity? How are human dignity and its foundation connected? Is the recent development of natural sciences dealing with human nature, like evolutionary psychology, relevant to these questions? The book addresses these points by connecting the discussion on the foundations of human rights with the recent claims regarding human nature made in evolutionary psychology, and with contemporary analytic metaphysics, especially the relation of metaphysical grounding. It offers in-depth insights into the so-called naturalistic approach to human rights, together with detailed proposals on how the approach could be truly naturalized in the philosophical sense. It shows how human rights and human dignity may have foundations in natural facts about human nature and offers a detailed analysis of how the “is” / “ought” gap problematic can be solved.The book also addresses the objection of Western ethnocentrism – unlike most of the contemporary philosophical accounts of human rights, which draw on highly individualistic Western concepts, it employs concepts like altruism and cooperation.

Grounding Human Rights in Human Nature

Grounding Human Rights in Human Nature PDF Author: Szymon Mazurkiewicz
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031307348
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Get Book Here

Book Description
What does it mean that human rights derive from human dignity? And what is the foundation of human dignity? How are human dignity and its foundation connected? Is the recent development of natural sciences dealing with human nature, like evolutionary psychology, relevant to these questions? The book addresses these points by connecting the discussion on the foundations of human rights with the recent claims regarding human nature made in evolutionary psychology, and with contemporary analytic metaphysics, especially the relation of metaphysical grounding. It offers in-depth insights into the so-called naturalistic approach to human rights, together with detailed proposals on how the approach could be truly naturalized in the philosophical sense. It shows how human rights and human dignity may have foundations in natural facts about human nature and offers a detailed analysis of how the “is” / “ought” gap problematic can be solved.The book also addresses the objection of Western ethnocentrism – unlike most of the contemporary philosophical accounts of human rights, which draw on highly individualistic Western concepts, it employs concepts like altruism and cooperation.

On Human Rights

On Human Rights PDF Author: James Griffin
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191623415
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
What is a human right? How can we tell whether a proposed human right really is one? How do we establish the content of particular human rights, and how do we resolve conflicts between them? These are pressing questions for philosophers, political theorists, jurisprudents, international lawyers, and activists. James Griffin offers answers in his compelling new investigation of the foundations of human rights. First, On Human Rights traces the idea of a natural right from its origin in the late Middle Ages, when the rights were seen as deriving from natural laws, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the original theological background was progressively dropped and 'natural law' emptied of most of its original meaning. By the end of the Enlightenment, the term 'human rights' (droits de l'homme) appeared, marking the purge of the theological background. But the Enlightenment, in putting nothing in its place, left us with an unsatisfactory, incomplete idea of a human right. Griffin shows how the language of human rights has become debased. There are scarcely any accepted criteria, either in the academic or the public sphere, for correct use of the term. He takes on the task of showing the way towards a determinate concept of human rights, based on their relation to the human status that we all share. He works from certain paradigm cases, such as freedom of expression and freedom of worship, to more disputed cases such as welfare rights - for instance the idea of a human right to health. His goal is a substantive account of human rights - an account with enough content to tell us whether proposed rights really are rights. Griffin emphasizes the practical as well as theoretical urgency of this goal: as the United Nations recognized in 1948 with its Universal Declaration, the idea of human rights has considerable power to improve the lot of humanity around the world. We can't do without the idea of human rights, and we need to get clear about it. It is our job now - the job of this book - to influence and develop the unsettled discourse of human rights so as to complete the incomplete idea.

Justifying Ethics

Justifying Ethics PDF Author: Jan Górecki
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412827096
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The idea of human rights is powerful. Deriving in its modern form from the Enlightenment, this doctrine has come to denote individual rights against government oppression, including the right to freedom of thought, religion, speech, assembly, and to a fair system of criminal justice. But even in this basic political sense "human rights" means different things in different historical and cultural contexts and advocacy of such rights has frequently been challenged as subjective. In "Justifying Ethics "Jan Gorecki offers a thoroughgoing critique of the most common attempts to formulate objective standards through appeals to human nature, religion, and reason. Gorecki opens his inquiry by considering the role of norm-making concepts in the history of ethical thought, how standards of rights were claimed to conform with human nature and reason or have been stipulated by an external authoritative source such as God or social contract. He then shows how such justifications may be discounted on analytical or practical grounds using such instances as divine will, Kantian reason, and the truth value of moral judgments. With respect to empirically grounded appeals to human nature, Gorecki argues against the notion that the innate plasticity of human behavior and potential for social diversity is sufficient grounds for human rights activity without objective justification. Whatever its difficulties, the search for justification remains essential in enhancing the persuasiveness of ethical action that aims at the moral "contagion" of the people by the human rights experience and the transition from moral acceptance to legal implementation. Broad in intellectual scope, "Justifying Ethics "draws upon moral and political philosophy, social policy, psychology, history, jurisprudence, and international law to clarify the prerequisites for the success of human rights activity. The book will be of special interest to political theorists, philosophers, sociologists, and human rights activists.

Griffin on Human Rights

Griffin on Human Rights PDF Author: Roger Crisp
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199668736
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This volume presents responses to the work of James Griffin, one of the most significant contributors to the contemporary debate over human rights. Leading moral and political philosophers engage with Griffin's views--according to which human rights are best understood as protections of our agency and personhood--and Griffin offers his own reply.

Human Rights and Human Nature

Human Rights and Human Nature PDF Author: Marion Albers
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401786720
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
This book explores both the possibilities and limits of arguments from human nature in the context of human rights. Can the concept of human nature provide a basis for understanding fundamental rights? Is it plausible to justify the claim to universal validity of human rights by reference to human nature? Or does the idea of human rights in its modern, post-1945 manifestation go, in essence, beyond human nature? The essays in this volume introduce naturalistic positions and their concomitant critiques. They address the role that human nature both actually does and potentially may play in forming a foundation for and acting as an exemplification of fundamental rights. Beyond that, they give attention to the challenges caused by Life Sciences. Human nature itself is subject to transformation and transgression in an unprecedented manner. The essays reflect on issues such as reproduction, species manipulation, corporeal autonomy and enhancement. Contributors are jurists, philosophers and political scientists from Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, Poland and Japan.

Earthing

Earthing PDF Author: Clinton Ober
Publisher: Basic Health Publications, Inc.
ISBN: 9781591202837
Category : Alternative medicine
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The solution for chronic inflammation, regarded as the cause of the most common modern diseases, has been identified! Earthing introduces the planet's powerful, amazing, and overlooked natural healing energy and how people anywhere can readily connect to it. This never-before-told story, filled with fascinating research and real-life testimonials, chronicles a discovery with the potential to create a global health revolution.

Human Rights and Human Nature

Human Rights and Human Nature PDF Author: Marion Albers
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9789401779876
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book explores both the possibilities and limits of arguments from human nature in the context of human rights. Can the concept of human nature provide a basis for understanding fundamental rights? Is it plausible to justify the claim to universal validity of human rights by reference to human nature? Or does the idea of human rights in its modern, post-1945 manifestation go, in essence, beyond human nature? The essays in this volume introduce naturalistic positions and their concomitant critiques. They address the role that human nature both actually does and potentially may play in forming a foundation for and acting as an exemplification of fundamental rights. Beyond that, they give attention to the challenges caused by Life Sciences. Human nature itself is subject to transformation and transgression in an unprecedented manner. The essays reflect on issues such as reproduction, species manipulation, corporeal autonomy and enhancement. Contributors are jurists, philosophers and political scientists from Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, Poland and Japan.

Vulnerability and Human Rights

Vulnerability and Human Rights PDF Author: Bryan S. Turner
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271030445
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
The mass violence of the twentieth century’s two world wars—followed more recently by decentralized and privatized warfare, manifested in terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and other localized forms of killing—has led to a heightened awareness of human beings’ vulnerability and the precarious nature of the institutions they create to protect themselves from violence and exploitation. This vulnerability, something humans share amid the diversity of cultural beliefs and values that mark their differences, provides solid ground on which to construct a framework of human rights. Bryan Turner undertakes this task here, developing a sociology of rights from a sociology of the human body. His blending of empirical research with normative analysis constitutes an important step forward for the discipline of sociology. Like anthropology, sociology has traditionally eschewed the study of justice as beyond the limits of a discipline that pays homage to cultural relativism and the “value neutrality” of positivistic science. Turner’s expanded approach accordingly involves a truly interdisciplinary dialogue with the literature of economics, law, medicine, philosophy, political science, and religion.

Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World

Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World PDF Author: Grace Y. Kao
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
ISBN: 1589017609
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
In 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which declared that every human being, without “distinction of any kind,” possesses a set of morally authoritative rights and fundamental freedoms that ought to be socially guaranteed. Since that time, human rights have arguably become the cross-cultural moral concept and evaluative tool to measure the performance—and even legitimacy—of domestic regimes. Yet questions remain that challenge their universal validity and theoretical bases. Some theorists are ”maximalist” in their insistence that human rights must be grounded religiously, while an opposing camp attempts to justify these rights in “minimalist” fashion without any necessary recourse to religion, metaphysics, or essentialism. In Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World, Grace Kao critically examines the strengths and weaknesses of these contending interpretations while also exploring the political liberalism of John Rawls and the Capability Approach as proposed by economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha Nussbaum. By retrieving insights from a variety of approaches, Kao defends an account of human rights that straddles the minimalist–maximalist divide, one that links human rights to a conception of our common humanity and to the notion that ethical realism gives the most satisfying account of our commitment to the equal moral worth of all human beings.

Natural Law and Human Rights

Natural Law and Human Rights PDF Author: Pierre Manent
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780268107215
Category : Human rights
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Pierre Manent is one of France's leading political philosophers. This first English translation of his profound and strikingly original book La loi naturelle et les droits de l'homme is a reflection on the central question of the Western political tradition. In six chapters, developed from the prestigious tienne Gilson lectures at the Institut Catholique de Paris, and in a related appendix, Manent contemplates the steady displacement of the natural law by the modern conception of human rights. He aims to restore the grammar of moral and political action, and thus the possibility of an authentically political order that is fully compatible with liberty rightly understood. Manent boldly confronts the prejudices and dogmas of those who have repudiated the classical and (especially) Christian notion of "liberty under law" and in the process shows how groundless many contemporary appeals to human rights turn out to be. Manent denies that we can generate obligations from a condition of what Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau call the "state of nature," where human beings are absolutely free, with no obligations to others. In his view, our ever-more-imperial affirmation of human rights needs to be reintegrated into what he calls an "archic" understanding of human and political existence, where law and obligation are inherent in liberty and meaningful human action. Otherwise we are bound to act thoughtlessly in an increasingly arbitrary or willful manner. Natural Law and Human Rights will engage students and scholars of politics, philosophy, and religion, and will captivate sophisticated readers who are interested in the question of how we might reconfigure our knowledge of, and talk with one another about, politics.