HR260: January 26th, 2026 Quiz Flash Cards

i hope i do well <3

What are Human Rights, Really?

Human Dignity

Autonomy (self-directed and self-authored life)

Reason (capacity for rationally purposive action)

Capacities

Equality

Needs

Social contracts

Protection from discrimination

Human Rights…(finish the sentence)

Cannot be understood outside their historical and conceptual backgrounds.

Essential Features of Human Rights

Human Rights are:

1. Distinctively modern

2. Political inventions

3. Inherently revolutionary

Why Human Rights?

The impact of the UDHR

• international law

• international relations

• notions of sovereignty

• domestic and international social movements

• Dominant normative/moral discourse of international relations

• Major standard of international legitimacy.

The Modernity of Human Rights

Better understood when contrasted with:
1. Medieval and pre-modern conceptions of rights

• anchored in social status

• corporate conception: classes or categories of persons rather than individuals

• rights depended upon and varied with status or social position

2. Notions of Dignity and Justice in Religious Cosmology

• religious worldview: social order is divinely
  orchestrated

• rights and duties reflect divine will or plan.

Modernity of Human Rights (2)

Profound transformation of medieval and religious views beginning C12th and C13th.

• Economic development; artistic and literary renaissance; religious reformation; intellectual flowering.

• Fostered:

  • humanism: emphasis on the achievements & potentials of people

  • rationalism: emphasis on reason & science than superstition

  • individualism: focus on persons than groups/classes.

Human Rights as Political Invention

Product of invention rather than evolution; radical and
disruptive.

• Thomas Hobbes:

  • revolt against religious cosmology

  • natural freedom and equality

  • but natural authority (leviathan) and subjection

• John Locke:

  • natural freedom and equality but consent of the ruled

  • human rights enshrined in natural law

  • role of government: to protect rights; else becomes illegitimate.

The Revolutionary Character of Human Rights

• HRs have never been given on a silver platter.

• Was the battle cry of revolutionaries in US and France

• ‘A revolution is not a tea party’(Lenin).

The Revolutionary Character of Human Rights (2)

• Kenneth Minogue (1979): ‘the leading edge of the axe of rationalism that toppled monarchies and cleared the ground for democracy’

• But incomplete: women, labourers, slaves, ‘indigenous’ people, colonized people, & children were excluded,

• Became double-edged sword: at each stage, the excluded used the logic of universality to challenge exclusion and the hypocrisy that supported it.

Appeal and Criticisms

• Appeal: its revolutionary potential and emancipatory logic makes human rights appealing to people struggling against domination and oppression

• Challenges any arbitrary or non-consensual grounds of subordination (e.g. sexism, racism, poverty).

• When invoke HRs, power is being challenged, domination contested, and authority questioned.

• Criticisms: ideological cover for political choices: e.g. colonialism was considered a ‘civilizing mission’; justification for dictatorship.

The Politics of Human Rights

• “To assert human rights ... First, it is to make a demand on society, to insist that things be arranged – economically, politically, culturally – so that everyone enjoys equal respect and dignity”.

• Hence, resonance with notions of justice and human dignity.

• Second: “the very act of claiming [human rights] helps to constitute people as political subjects”.

  • “When HRs are invoked, power is being challenged, domination contested, authority questioned.”

• Third: HRs are essentially value claims: ‘they express a certain set of political convictions and aspirations concerning the freedom and equality of all people. HRs are sometimes asserted as rhetorical or ideological cover for political choices” (e.g. colonialism seen as a ‘civilizing mission’ by colonizers.

The Practice of Human Rights

• HRs inherently political; but not only a political idea.

• Cannot fully understand human rights without also understanding the real world of human rights; their actual use and effects.

• Practice is evident in the history of social movements, legal developments, political argumentation, institutional consolidation, and public discourse.

• How one reads and understands this history depends on one’s ideological persuasions.

• The challenge of human rights: means different things to different people.

Human Rights as an Object of Inquiry

• Rich and complex object of study: normative, empirical, and critical approaches; has historical, sociological, anthropological, comparative and international dimensions.

• Discipline: theory and practice (i.e. normative and empirical)

• Normative: philosophical and policy questions (theories, standards and what they entail)

• Empirical: how human rights work in reality (laws, practices, institutions, violations etc)

The Emergence of Rights Language

• Rights language developed gradually through Western political history, reaching its first golden age in the European Enlightenment.

• Conceptions of society, individuality, freedom, liberty, government, and religion lay the groundwork for human rights—or, as they were called at the time, the rights of man.

Religious Origins

• The Ten Commandments: The right of individuals to own property.

• Thomas Aquinas & St. Augustine: Equality of all peoples before God; universal laws.

• Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274): Human dignity & value are innate properties validated by natural law.

• Overall contribution: Notion of world citizenship; universal human rights.

Classical (Philosophical) Origins of Rights

Plato (427-348 BC): universalism in ethical principles.

Aristotle (384-322 BC): virtue, justice, and rights.

Cicero and Seneca: citizens of a universal community.

Cicero (106-43 BC): universal principles which should transcend local civil laws.

Political Roots

• Right language developed gradually through Western political history

• Magna Carta 1215 (England): Equality before the law, the right to property, elements of religious freedom.

• The English Bill of Rights (1688-89): Made monarch accountable to parliament; abolished royal absolutism, the rule of law

• Major limitation: applied only to nobles.

Political Roots (2)

The practice of claiming modern rights is associated with the idea of individual liberty, culminating in the Enlightenment.

• Key grand rights documents include:

  • The US Declaration of Independence (1776); ended colonialism

  • The French Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen (1789) (ended absolute monarchism of ancient regime)

  • Individual autonomy; liberal democracy; capitalist economic development.

Natural Law Origins

• John Locke (1632-1704)

• Second Treatise of Government (1690).

• Ontology: man is naturally peaceful, free & mercantile.

• Minimal Role for State: occasional independent arbiter in disputes.

• Natural Rights: life, liberty, & property.

• Limitations: only for white males.

Early Critics of Rights

By the time of the Rights Declarations, key philosophers were forcefully attacking the idea of natural rights.

These attacks came from:

• Conservatives (e.g. Hobbes)

• Liberals (particularly utilitarians) (e.g. Bentham)

• Socialists (Marx)

Conservatives

• Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan)

• Theory of Human Nature: ‘war of all against all’.

• But strong desire for self-preservation:

  • social contract.

  • strong state.

• Rights implications:

  • right of king to rule because of the contract.

  • citizens’ right to basic security and protection.

• Hence, rights are not innate (natural)

Liberals

• Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

• Critic of natural law/rights.

• Utilitarian: ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’

• Rational choice model: ‘utilitarian or moral calculus’.

• Men invented rights out of necessity; they are not innate.

Radicals

• Karl Marx (1818-1883)

• There are no pre-social rights (i.e. no rights outside society).

• French Declaration saw humans only as ‘bourgeois individuals, separated from each other and from their communities’.

• Rights are political, social and are achieved through historical struggle. (i.e. rights are not natural).

• Difference between being ‘recognized in law as individuals with certain highly individualized rights’ and being ‘allowed to develop as a moral person within a set of conditions which are fair and equally accessible for all persons’.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights/Universality of Human Rights

• The United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated (implemented) in 1948.

• Defining text of the modern human rights regime.

• No philosophical justification is formally given for the rights declared because of the variability of human belief systems.

• Individuals and groups are left to expound their own justifications for the rights in the Declaration.

Types of Human Rights: Liberty and Welfare Rights

• The UDHR and other UN HR instruments contain both liberty rights and welfare rights.

• Difference between the two types can be explained using the classic Negative / Positive distinction.

• Negative rights require only passive non-interference to be realized, whereas positive rights need to be actively pursued by state or inter-governmental agents.

• A false dichotomy: both liberty and welfare rights need complex combinations of respect, protection, facilitation and fulfillment by a range of different actors.

• Reinforces notion that they are indivisible, interdependent and inter-related.