The normativity of human rights is self-evident

Human Rights Quarterly

Volumn 32, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 187-197

  Etzioni, Amitai ^a  

^a GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

HUMAN RIGHTS; MORALITY;

EID: 77949994988     PISSN: 02750392     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hrq.0.0134     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. I am not the first to describe human rights as a "self-evident" moral claim. See, e.g., Louis HENKIN, THE AGE OF RIGHTS 2 (1990).
2. Michael Ignatieff, The Attack on Human Rights, 80 FOREIGN AFF. 102, 108 (2001).
3. Id. at 109.
4. JOHN LOCKE, SECOND TREATISE ON GOVERNMENT 9 (C.B. Macpherson ed., Hackett Publ'g 1980) (1 690) (emphasis omitted).
5. S. Pac. Co. v. Jensen, 244 U.S. 205, 222 (1 91 7) (Holmes, J., dissenting).
6. Michael S. Moore, Law as a Functional Kind, in NATURAL LAW THEORY 1 88, 1 88 (Robert P. George ed., 1992) (commenting on Justice Holmes's remarks, supra note 5).
7. Joel Feinberg, The Nature and Value of Rights, in THE PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN RIGHTS 174, 182 (Patrick Hayden ed., 2001).
8. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted 16 Dec. 1966, G.A. Res 2200 (XXI), U.N.GAOR, 21stSess., pmbl., U.N.Doc. A/6316 (1966), 999 U.N.T.S. 171 (entered into force 23 Mar. 1976).
9. Jack Donnelly, Human Rights and Human Dignity: An Analytic Critique of Non-Western Conceptions of Human Rights, 76 AM. POL. SCI. REV. 303, 307 (1982).
10. Heiner Bielefeldt, Muslim Voices in the Human Rights Debate, 17 HUM. RTS. Q. 587, 605 (1995).
11. See, e.g., ALASDAIR MACINTYRE, AFTER VIRTUE: A STUDY IN MORAL THEORY (1 984).
12. ALISON DUNDES RENTELN, INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS: UNIVERSALISM VERSUS RELATIVISM 88-137 (1990).
13. RHODA E. HOWARD, HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE SEARCH FOR COMMUNITY 142 (1995).
14. It might be said that I argue that human rights need no case to be made for them, but I am making one: against those who seek to support human rights by basing them on other concepts.
15. See DAVID HUME, ENQUIRIES CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING AND CONCERNING THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALS (L.A. Selby-Bigge & P.H. Nidditch eds., Oxford Univ. Press 3d ed. 1975) (1777);
16. DAVID HUME, A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE (L.A. Selby-Bigge & P.H. Nidditch eds., Oxford Univ. Press 2d ed. 1978) (1739-40).
17. Peter Singer may be the only one who contests this point. He writes famously: "if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out ... It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away." Peter Singer, Famine, Affluence, and Morality, 1 PHIL. & PUB. AFF. 229, 231-232 (1972).
18. For a more detailed refutation of Singer on this point, see Amitai Etzioni, Are Particularistic Obligations Justified? A Communitarian Examination, 64 REV. POL. 573 (2002).
19. Some added arguments as an afterthought, to examine and account for a moral sense which they already recognized. In other words, this is where ethics and moral philosophy comes in.
20. HENKIN, supra note 1, at 26-29.
21. Epistemologist Robert Audi writes that "since premises are not needed as a ground for justified belief of a self-evident proposition, there is also no basis for demanding an independent argument in every case where there is an appeal to the self-evident." Robert Audi, Self-Evidence, 13 PHIL. PERSP. 205, 223 (1999).
22. CHARLES TAYLOR, SOURCES OF THE SELF: THE MAKING OF THE MODERN IDENTITY 5 (1989).
23. Id. at 5-8.
24. Id. at 7.
25. Michael P. Zuckert argues that Jefferson, followingJohn Locke and others, took self-evident truths to "serve as the most fundamental sort of premise, what in mathematics are called axioms." Michael P. Zuckert, Self-Evident Truth and the Declaration of Independence, 49 REV. POL. 319, 322 (1987).
26. Alvin Plantinga, Is Belief in God Rational?, in RATIONALITY AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF 7, 19 (C. F. Delaney ed., 1979).
27. See, e.g., BERNARD WILLIAMS, TRUTH AND TRUTHFULNESS 11 (2002). Williams argues that accuracy and sincerity are "virtues of truth."
28. See MARTIN BUBER, I AND THOU (Walter Kaufmann trans., Charles Scribner's Sons 1970) (1923).
29. Interview with Hans Joas, Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago, in Berlin, Germany (1 June 2003).
30. Id.
31. Amartya Sen, Human Rights and Asian Values, NEW REPUBLIC, 14-21 July 1997, at 33.
32. HUMAN RIGHTS IN CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES: A QUEST FOR CONSENSUS (Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im ed., 1992).
33. See, e.g., id.;
34. see also Stanley Fish, Don't Blame Relativism, 12 RESPONSIVE COMMUNITY 27 (2002).
35. Richard Rorty, Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality, INTHE PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN RIGHTS, supra note 7, at 241, 254.
36. See, e.g., Dale Jamieson, When Utilitarians Should Be Virtue Theorists, 19 UTILITAS 160 (2007).