Atheory of Human Rights
David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Jack Alan Reynolds
Learn more about PhilPapers
Since the original UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights1 laid out the general principles of human rights, there has been a split between what have been regarded as civil and political rights as opposed to economic, cultural and social rights. It was, in fact, the denial that both could be considered “rights” that prevented them from being included in the same covenant.2 Essentially, the argument for distinguishing the two concerns the nature of freedom. The civil rights to the freedoms of speech, religion, assembly, association, and so on do not specify the content of the speech, the theology of the religion or the purpose of the assembly or association. 3 Freedom in such cases is necessarily value-neutral. In leaving the choice up to the individual, these rights purposefully abstract from the content of this choice. The case is quite different for economic, cultural and social rights. All of these necessarily express values with regard to the forms of our social organization. This is because they move beyond individual choices to consider the purposes or goals of our existence together. Thus, the rights to the cultivation of a cultural identity necessarily impact more than the individuals exercising them. As collective, they affect the society as a whole. The same holds for the UN sponsored rights of a person “to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.”4 For a society to honor these rights involves specific choices with regard to its social content and collective organization. Such choices embody a particular value—in the UN’s words, that of the “social security” of the individual.5 Freedom, here, is freedom for specific social goals. Since these goals are collective, they..
|Keywords||No keywords specified (fix it)|
|Categories||categorize this paper)|
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server
Configure custom proxy (use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy)
|Through your library||
References found in this work BETA
No references found.
Citations of this work BETA
No citations found.
Similar books and articles
P. J. Lomelino (2007). Individuals and Relational Beings. Social Philosophy Today 23:87-101.
Manuel Toscano (2012). Language Rights as Collective Rights: Some Conceptual Considerations on Language Rights. Res Publica 27:109-118.
Sumner B. Twiss (2004). History, Human Rights, and Globalization. Journal of Religious Ethics 32 (1):39-70.
Joseph Wronka (1994). Human Rights and Social Policy in the United States: An Educational Agenda for the 21st Century. Journal of Moral Education 23 (3):261-272.
Erol Kuyurtar (2007). Are Cultural Group Rights Against Individual Rights? The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy 3:51-59.
Sivanandam Panneerselvam (2008). Human Rights in Indian Context. Proceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 11:85-91.
Martin Gunderson (2011). Does the Human Right to Health Lack Content? Social Philosophy Today 27:49-62.
Duane Windsor (2010). Corporations and Global Human Rights. Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society 21:1-11.
W. J. Talbott (2010). Human Rights and Human Well-Being. Oxford University Press.
Pradeep Dhillon (2011). The Role of Education in Freedom From Poverty as a Human Right. Educational Philosophy and Theory 43 (3):249-259.
David Hollenbach (1998). Solidarity, Development, and Human Rights: The African Challenge. Journal of Religious Ethics 26 (2):305 - 317.
Alistair M. Macleod (2008). Universal Human Rights and Cultural Diversity. Social Philosophy Today 24:13-26.
Added to index2010-12-22
Total downloads7 ( #198,193 of 1,139,990 )
Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #157,514 of 1,139,990 )
How can I increase my downloads?