Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-31T20:57:59.029Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Are human rights universal?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2013

By
Rex Martin
Edited by
Cindy Holder  and
David Reidy
Cindy Holder
Affiliation:
University of Victoria, British Columbia
David Reidy
Affiliation:
University of Tennessee
Get access

Summary

Natural rights and human rights

Natural rights are the ancestor of contemporary human rights; and the idea of natural rights was a doctrine of universal rights, at least of those basic moral rights that were thought to hold good in a state of nature. The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) is the keystone of contemporary human rights thinking, and it proceeds from the view that the human rights enunciated there have a foundation in morality and are universal.

By the last few decades of the nineteenth century, the notion of natural rights had lost or begun to lose its appeal (see Waldron 1987, for excerpts from some of the main critics). After World War II, universal rights made a return to center stage, first in the United Nations Charter (1945) and then in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) and the various covenants and treaties respecting human rights that came after that. But this return was not simply a revival of old-style natural rights. Indeed, many writers today (e.g., Beitz 2009; Boucher 2009; Darby 2009) stress that there is a considerable discontinuity between natural rights and what are today called human rights.

Type
Chapter
Information
Human Rights
The Hard Questions
 , pp. 59 - 76
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Beetham, David. 1995. “What Future for Economic and Social Rights?” Political Studies 43, 41–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beitz, Charles. 2009. The Idea of Human Rights. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boucher, David. 2009. The Limits of Ethics in International Relations: Natural Law, Natural Rights, and Human Rights in Transition. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, Shaohua and Ravallion, Martin. 2007. “Absolute Poverty Measures for the Developing World.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4211.
Cranston, Maurice. 1967. “Human Rights, Real and Supposed.” In D.D. Raphael, ed., Political Theory and the Rights of Man. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 43–53.Google Scholar
Cranston, Maurice 1973. What Are Human Rights? 2nd edn. London: Bodley Head.Google Scholar
Darby, Derrick. 2009. Rights, Race, and Recognition. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dworkin, Ronald. 1978. Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Originally published in 1977; important appendix added in 1978.)Google Scholar
Martin, Rex. 1993. A System of Rights. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mayo, Bernard. 1965. “What Are Human Rights?” Symposium on “Human Rights,” II. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 39, 219–236.Google Scholar
Nickel, James W. 2007. Making Sense of Human Rights, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
O’Neill, Onora. 1996. Toward Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Neill, Onora 2000. Bounds of Justice. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Neill, Onora 2005. “The Dark Side of Human Rights.” International Affairs 81:2, 427–439.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pogge, Thomas. 2002. World Poverty and Human Rights. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Pogge, Thomas 2005. “Severe Poverty as a Human Rights Violation.” In Thomas Pogge, ed., Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right: Who Owes What to the Very Poor?Oxford University Press, pp. 11–54.Google Scholar
Raphael, David. 1967a. “Human Rights, Old and New.” In D.D. Raphael, ed., Political Theory and the Rights of Man. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 54–67.Google Scholar
Raphael, David 1967b. “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Citizen.” In D.D. Raphael, ed., Political Theory and the Rights of Man. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 101–118.Google Scholar
Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice, 1st edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (2nd edn., 1999.)Google Scholar
Rawls, John 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. (Enlarged edn., in paperback, 1996.)Google Scholar
Rawls, John 1999. The Law of Peoples with “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. New York: Anchor Books.Google Scholar
Shue, Henry. 1996. Basic Rights, 2nd edn. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). 2010. Human Development Report 2010. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
UNESCO, ed. 1949. Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations. New York: Columbia University Press.
Waldron, Jeremy, ed. 1987. Nonsense Upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man. New York and London: Methuen.
Wellman, Carl. 1995. Real Rights. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wenar, Leif. 2003. “What We Owe to Distant Others.” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 2:3, 283–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×