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Review Essay a Secular View of Human Rights
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 September 2015
Extract
Michael J. Perry's The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries is a major contribution to the clarification of the idea of human rights, which he considers to be, for many, the most difficult of all the influential moral ideas to take center stage in the twentieth century. He argues that it is, “in one form or another,” an “old idea” and opens his Introduction with a quotation from Leszek Kolakowski dismissing the assertion that “the idea of human rights is of recent origin.” For someone who is as ready to admit being a “secular enthusiast of human rights” as the author of this comment, Perry's denial of the fact that human rights constitute a recent phenomenon certainly “poses a problem.” The problem is really essential with regard to Perry's foundational conviction advanced in Chapter I, where he claims that the idea of human rights is ineliminably, inescapably, religious, and that so is the view that “every human being is sacred.”
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- Perry Symposium
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 1999
References
1. Perry, Michael J., The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries 29 (Oxford U Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
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5. The classification of human rights in individual rights, collective rights and rights of the group as such is also the result of modern legal and political thought, although some precedents can be found in earlier treaties and in humanitarian intervention.
6. Sieghart, Paul, The International Law of Human Rights 15 (Clarendon Press, 1995)Google Scholar. The author reminds us that references to the Creator or to Nature were deleted from the draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights shortly before its adoption.
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8. Id at 18. Cohn provides some examples: prohibitions such as “thou shalt not steal” or “thou shalt not remove thy neighbor's landmark” may be read to imply a right to property and possession, nowhere spelled out as such; the duty of learning and teaching is reiterated, but there is no right to education articulated anywhere.
9. Id at 18-19.
10. Id at 19.
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19. Id at 13-14.
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21. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Preamble, GA Res 2200A, 21 UN GAOR, Supp No 16 at 52, UN Doc A/6316 (1966); International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Preamble, GA Res 2200A (21), 21 UN GAOR, Supp No 16 at 49, UN Doc A/6316 (1966). “Dignity and worth inherent in the human person” is the wording of the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights.