چکیده:
Many contemporary authors fear that the proliferation of rights-claims may
cause human rights to fall victim to their own popularity. If every good that is
desired by one or another group of people is cloaked in the venerable garbs of a
human right, and there is no way to tell ‘real’ from ‘supposed’ human rights,
this may generate scepticism towards the concept of human rights in general.
However deplorable this situation may be, for moral philosophers it may be
thought to involve an opportunity to reaffirm the importance of their
discipline. After all, how else could we distinguish genuine from imaginary
human rights than by building a theory about the subject? The aim of my paper
is to show that this idea is exactly wrong — that the proliferation of human
rights claims cannot be stopped even in theory. It is a mistake to think that the
proliferation of rights claims results from a lack of awareness of the proper
theoretical foundation of human rights. On the contrary, I will argue that the
proliferation of rights mirrors a deep problem in secular theories of human
rights, that these theories do not have the conceptual resources to limit ever
larger rights claims. I will suggest that to understand the present situation, we
need to look into the religious presuppositions of the culture in which natural
rights to subsistence were first proclaimed. Specifically, I will argue that
contemporary theories of human rights are secularized versions of a religious
precursor.
خلاصه ماشینی:
"/> From the thirteenth century till at least the seventeenth century the idea that people have an ‘inclusive’ right to those things necessary for survival has been defended on the basis of an original right of use, granted by God that could be limited by the institution of property but could never “be emptied totally” (Ockham, 2000: 443) Despite the many differences in opinion on the precise nature of the rights of the poor, it seems that there existed a relatively broad consensus to the effect that God’s grant to human beings implied that every human being should have access to as much goods as necessary to sustain his or her life.
In searching for answers to these questions, I will rely principally upon three authors who have, in my view, provided the best sustained attempts to ground human rights to welfare, namely Raymond Plant, James Griffin and Alan Gewirth.
A more promising way to avoid this problem would be to deny that personhood or agency is essential to having rights, or, alternatively, to employ a conception of personhood that is not dependent on the possession of certain capacities like the ability to reason or develop life-plans.
What distinguishes human beings from other creatures and grounds their status as rights subjects, according to these theories, is precisely their ability to develop such a plan themselves.