HUMANITY OF RIGHTS (original) (raw)
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The inhuman character of human rights
The word "rights" means the claim or requirement that results from any kind of written or common Law. There is no such thing as "rights" that does not spring from a system of Law. That's why whoever has "rights", keeps power: It is the power (provided by Law) of an individual or a group of individuals who demand for a public or a private interest to be satisfied. The enactment of this power is a claim mandatory upon all.
Relativism and Human Rights. A Theory of Pluralist Universalism
Springer-Nature, 2022
Almost a decade has passed since the publication of this book. A work originally conceived for my doctoral thesis, to read back the original version provoked a sense of surprise but also of distance. Along with the pleasure of unexpected connections comes a feeling of estrangement for some of its elaborations. I have therefore intended to remedy to this difficulty with an overall revision of this text belonging to an early phase of my formation. After all this time, previous interests have found new syntheses in current methodological transformations and ideas. I have therefore written new chapters and reorganized again several chapters and some of the fundamental theses of the original version. The result has been a new book, a rethinking of the philosophical core of a theory of human rights. An important addition has considered the duplicity of the point of observation in which human rights have been justified. On the one hand, human rights have been argued in terms of formal liberties, that is, as necessary presuppositions to justify rational action through discursive practice; on the other hand, the idea of human rights has been argued in terms of applicative standards of judgment. The mediation between these two levels, then, has required a rethinking of the theory through the consideration of the concept of human dignity as a general principle of the system of human rights (therefore not as a right among the others). Human dignity, indeed, provides an orientation to the use of reflective judgment in human rights. If something resilient to time is therefore in these pages, this is undoubtedly in an attempt to reconsider some of the points left suspended in the first edition. There is no doubt that a philosophical discourse on human rights cannot avoid considering what is truth (what I define as “experiential truth”), or what are the conditions of normative validity for individual agency. Human rights represent, in fact, a self-fulfilled philosophical discourse, and even more, a discourse requiring the contribution of a multiplicity of levels of analysis. In the following pages I will consider the idea that human rights express an epochal and revolutionary character of modernity. They represent, that is, elements of self-reflection of the modern man in the process of defining himself as a worthy subject of equal respect.
Human Rights: the unstoppable force
In the beginning of the century, global processes produced numerous challenges to theorists because theory no longer reflected reality. Population movements, organized civil society, transnational companies changed the status of sovereignty. Rights no longer stemmed from private attributes of nationality, people have been seeking in human rights legislation, universal principles and international instruments to guarantee their well-being. Every human being is born with a framework of inalienable rights. Moreover, that means that we agreed that principles such as dignity were worth preserving, which was not always the case. During this article, it is aimed to show how society and the Human Rights framework aggregated values that moved us closer to the idea of society we want to become. In addition, it is shown how Institutions and nongovernmental actors were a big part of this culture change. The sovereign acts of states increasingly became privileges from which derived rights and duties. From the time that states began to join international organizations, ratify human rights treaties, they become willingly parts of a framework of legal protection to ensure legitimacy. However, this legal framework provides standards that must be followed in order to maintain stability in the international system. The 60s and 70s are known as times of great turbulence in the economic and political sphere. After this period, non-state actors emerge with strength, and relevant role to be considered and understand in the new world dynamics. The term globalization is now commonly used to refer to the intensification of transnational interactions and cross-border. The multiplicity of actors and the emergence of transnational civil society organizations are important factors to explain the change in the structure, through the strengthening of human rights culture and the transformation of the identity of the actors as more moral. Most of the information transmission and awareness of rules and policies focusing on protection of the individual is made by civil society.
Law, Personhood and the Discontents of Juridical Humanism
The paper describes the current account of personhood in law claiming that it is based on philosophical assumptions that could be called the “Juridical Humanism”. However, it becomes more and more difficult to reconcile Juridical Humanism with the ethical implications of some important advances in the contemporary science and technology, such as the progress of knowledge about animals, research on human-animals chimeras and hybrids as well as developments of artificial parts of human body and brain and wholly artificial agents of growing scope of autonomy. The decline of Juridical Humanism and its underlying philosophical foundations makes it necessary to rethink the conceptual and ethical basis of the legal approach to personhood. Such reconsideration should lead to a deeper distinction between human and non-human persons as well as between persons and nonpersonal subjects of law (in place of traditional dichotomy of persons and things).
Features of Human Dignity in the Context of the Modern Philosophy of Law
WISDOM, 2020
The article explores the notion and peculiarities of the concept of “human dignity” in the modern democratic, legal state. In the given research the author implements holistic, systematical (methodical) analysis of content and distinguishing features of the dignity as the structural element of the concept “legal status of the individual”. This study is also focusing on various approaches of well-known jurists on the essence, content and legislative consolidation of the dignity of the individual. The author comes to a conclusion, that the dignity of a person, who is a subject of law, is ensured by the complex of subjective rights and freedoms assigned to him or her, which constitute the legal status of a person. In other words, the person is both a subject of law and of “dignity”. Therefore, the dignity of the person becomes, from a legal point of view, a complex interdisciplinary legal institute. Consequently, the whole mission of this legal institute is to fulfil the virtues of man...
1988
A glance at history shows that the progressive development of human rights has been considerably conditioned by the evolution of social relations, and the forms in which these relations were institutionalized. It was not in abstract that newly recognised human rights came to be defined, but in the context of the modern state and that of an industrial and technological civilization; in the context of the bitter experience of two World Wars and the social and political evolution after 1945. This evolution has been characterized by a process of decolonialisation, by a growing sense of solidarity among mankind, and by a widespread awareness of the delicate ecological balance of our one and only Earth which is limited in its natural resources. The remarkable thing about the evolution of human rights is that it appears to have followed in a given direction. In fact, we notice the widening of the concept of human rights which had originated in the eighteenth century. Throughout the whole d...
THE EMERGENCE AND ANALYSIS OF HUMAN RIGHTS
Human rights are moral principles or norms, that describe certain standards of human behavior, and are regularly protected aslegal rights in municipal and international law. They are commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights "to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being," and which are "inherent in all human beings" regardless of their nation, location, language, religion, ethnic origin or any other status. They are applicable everywhere and at every time in the sense of being universal, and they are egalitarian in the sense of being the same for everyone. They require empathy and the rule of law and impose an obligation on persons to respect the human rights of others. Yet, we often are debating on the issues of the existence of these rights. The society has reduced its standard and has lowered down in underestimating the existence of fellow humans. the article analyses the emergence and the existence of human rights being bestowed on humans by the virtue of their existence.
Beyond the dominant discourse of human rights Além do discurso dominante dos direitos humanos
2016
It promotes a critical reflection on the theoretical foundations of the dominant discourse of human rights, from a relativistic role of European Modernity seeking afford to see ideas, struggles, thoughts and peripheral stories as a first step to reshape this discourse whose effectiveness remains questioned, in practice. It assumes that the theoretical foundations of the dominant discourse of human rights has been the subject of extensive research, which, at first, might suggest that the discussion on this subject was already exhausted and therefore does not deserve greater contributions. These conceptions about the human rights foundations, usually rest in some incontrovertible premises. This discourse, for reasons that will be presented, was designed as a hegemonic discourse. The theoretical reference counter-hegemonic is based on Makau Mutua and Sousa Santos’ thinking. The general objective of the authors is to generate a critical reflection of this dominant conception of human ri...