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Moral Foundations of Civil Rights Law*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2015

Alan Gewirth
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Extract

The idea of civil rights continues to arouse intense controversy. Despite the great advances in civil rights law during the past generation, American public life is still marked by severe disagreements over whether individuals and, especially, groups have rights to receive certain kinds of help from the state not only in the social and economic spheres but even in such matters as demarcation of voting districts and other political arrangements. The disagreements bear on the applications of certain basic principles of communal life and on the contents of the principles themselves.

In this paper I will explore four avenues. First, I shall briefly analyze some of the main elements in the concept of civil rights law in order to clarify why the law needs moral foundations, and how civil rights are related to the human rights that are the central concern of morality. Second, I shall show how the moral principle of human rights can itself be rationally justified. Third, I shall briefly develop certain applications of this moral principle to the economic problems that constitute some of the main areas of controversy in civil rights law. Fourth, I shall indicate how the moral principle of human rights bears on certain residual controversies about the applications of civil rights law to the problems of affirmative action and preferential treatment.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , 1987 , pp. 125 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 1987

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Footnotes

*

© 1988 The Catholic University of America.

References

1. See Cranston, M. & Fawcett, J., Political Theory and the Rights of Man 46, 127 (Raphael, D. ed. 1967)Google Scholar. See also Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and Civil and Political Rights reprinted in A. Robertson, Human Rights in the World 191–223 (1972)Google Scholar (these are two international covenants adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 16, 1966). The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is reprinted in both the Raphael and the Robertson volumes.

2. Aristotle, , Politics, I.2.1253 ffGoogle Scholar.

3. Gewirth, A., Reason and Morality 316–17 (1978)Google Scholar.

4. See Gewirth, supra note 3, at 82-102. See also Gewirth, A., Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications 67–76 (1982)Google Scholar, and Gewirth's Ethical Rationalism, (Regis, E. Jr. ed. 1984)Google Scholar.

5. For fuller discussion of these three types of state, see Gewirth, supra note 3, at 290-327 (1978).