Reason in Historical Concepts of Human Rights - Essay Example

The Role of Reason in the Historical Concepts of Human Rights Discussed The term "human rights" is comparatively new, having come into everyday manner of speaking only since World War II and the founding of the United Nations in 1945, it replaces the phrase "natural rights", which fell into disfavors in part because the concept of natural law to which it was intimately linked had become a matter of great controversy, and the later phrase "the rights of Man" which was not universally understood to include the rights of women. Many scholars and students of human rights trace the historical stemmata or origins of the concept back to ancient Greece and Rome, where it was closely tied to the pre-modern natural law doctrines of Greek Stocism , the school of philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium, which held that a universal working force pervades or spread in all creation and that human conduct therefore should be judged according to, and brought into harmony with, the law of nature. The classic example drawn from the Greek literature is that of Antigone, who upon being reproached by Creon for defying his command not to bury her slain brother, asserted that she acted in accordance with the immutable laws of the gods. Human rights concepts however can actually be traced to an earlier period. The Old Testament of the Bible relates the story of ancient Israelites, and in it are abundant inferences about human rights, there is no well-developed statement on the issue but there are significant scattered passages that give clear evidence of a point of view at least as advanced as Greek and Roman philosophy. The Ten Commandments for example, by the prohibition of murder and theft, give implicit recognition is considerably broadened by later elaboration of the laws and by the passionate discourses on justice by such prophets as Amos that can be read in his book in the Old Testament If the concept of human rights is very old, the general recognition of their validity is not, throughout most of history governments failed to accepts the notion that people have rights independent of the state, this called statism and it implies the supremacy of the state in all matters pertaining to the lives of subjects, it is still potent concept in the 20th century, Germany under Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union during the rule of Joseph Staliln are prime examples of statism. It was not until after the Middle Ages, however that natural law doctrines became closely associated with liberal political theories about natural rights, in Greco-Roman and Medieval times natural law doctrines taught mainly the duties, as distinguished from the rights of man, in addition as evidence can be read in the writing of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, these doctrines recognized the legitimacy of slavery and serfdom (someone who is bound to the land and owned by the feudal lord) and in doing so, excluded perhaps the central most ideas of human rights as they are understood today, the ideas of freedom or liberty and equality. For the idea of human rights to take hold as a general social need and reality, it was necessary that basic changes in the beliefs and practices of society take place, changes of the sort that evolved from about the 13th century to the Peace of Westphalia (1648), during the Renaissance and the decline of feudalism. When resistance to religious intolerance and political-economic bondage began the long transition to liberal notions of freedom and equality, particularly in relation to the use of ownership of property, then were the foundations of what today is called Human Rights truly laid. During this period reflecting to the failures of the rulers to meet their natural law obligations as well as the unprecedented commitment to the individual expression and worldly experience that was characteristics of the Renaissance, the shift from natural laws of duties to natural laws as rights was made. The teaching of Aquinas (1224/25-1274) and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) on the European continent and the Magna Carta (1215), the Petition of Right of 1628 and the English Bill of Rights (1689) in England were proof of this change. All testified to the increasing popular view that human beings are endowed with eternal and inalienable rights, never renounced when humankind contracted to enter the social from the primitive state and never diminished by the claim of "the divine right of the kings" It was primarily for the 17th and 18th centuries however to elaborate upon this modernist conception of natural law as meaning or implying natural rights, the scientific and intellectual achievements of the 17th century, like the discoveries of Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton, materialism of Thomas Hobbes, the rationalism of Rene Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and the empiricism of Francis Bacon and John Locke, encouraged a belief in natural law and universal order and during the 18th century, the so-called Age of Enlightenment, a growing confidence in human reason and in the perfectibility of human affairs led to its more comprehensive expression, particularly to be noted are the writings of the English philosopher John Locke, arguably the most important natural law theorist of modern times, and the works of the 18th century philosophers centered mainly in Paris including Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. John Locke argued in detail mainly in writings associated with the Revolution of 1688 (the Glorious Revolution), that certain rights self evidently pertain to individuals as human beings, because they existed in "the state of nature" before humankind entered civil society, that chief among them are rights to life, liberty (freedom from arbitrary rule), and property, that upon entering civil society pursuant to a "social contract" humankind surrendered to the state only the right to enforce these natural rights, not the rights themselves, and that the state's failure to secure these reserved natural rights, because the state itself being under contract to safeguard the interests of its members, gives rise to a right to responsible popular revolution. Locke and other philosophers embracing many varied currents of thought with a common supreme faith in reason, vigorously attacked religious and scientific dogmatism, intolerance, censorship, and social-economic restraints, they sought to discover and act upon universally valid principles harmoniously governing nature, humanity and society including the theory of the alienable "rights of Man" that became their fundamental ethical and social gospel. All this liberal and intellectual ferment or state of turbulent change or development had, it is not surprisingly great influence on the Western world of the late 18th and 19th centuries also fermenting. Together with the practical example of England Revolution in 1688 and the resulting Bill of Rights, it provided the rationale for the wave of revolutionary agitation that then swept the West, most notably in North America and France, Thomas Jefferson who had studied Locke philosophy, and who asserted that his countrymen were a "free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature and not as the gift of their Chief Magistrate" gave poetic eloquence to the plain prose of the 17th century in the Declaration of Independence proclaimed by the 13 American Colonies on July 4, 1776: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuits of Happiness." Similarly, the Marquis de Lafayette, who won the close friendship of George Washington and who shared the hardships of the American War of Independence, imitated the pronouncements of the English and American Revolution in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen on August 26, 1789. Insisting that "men are born and remain free and equal in rights," the declarations proclaims that "the aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man," identifies these rights as "Liberty, Property, Safety and Resistance to Oppression," and defines "liberty" so as to include the right to free speech, freedom of association, religious freedom, and freedom from arbitrary arrest and confinement as if anticipating the Bill of Rights added in 1797 to the Constitution of the United States of 1787. As summation, the idea of human rights, called by another name, played a key role of reason in the late 18th century and early 19th century struggles against political absolutism. It was indeed the failure of the rulers to respect the principles of freedom and equality which had been central to natural law philosophy almost from the beginning, which was responsible for this development. In the words of Maurice Cranston, a leading student of human rights in United States says, "absolutism prompted man to claim human or natural rights precisely because it denied them." The idea of human rights as natural rights was not without its detractors, however even at this receptive time, in the first place being frequently associated with religious orthodox, the doctrine of natural rights became less and less acceptable to philosophical and political liberals, and additionally they were conceived in essentially absolutist "inalienable", "unalterable" or "eternal" natural rights were found increasingly to come into conflict with one another, most importantly the doctrine of natural rights came under powerful philosophical and political attack from both the right and the left. In England for example, conservatives Edmund Burke and David Hume united with liberal Jeremy Bentham in condemning the doctrine, the former out of fear that public affirmation of natural rights would lead to social upheaval, the latter out of concern lest declaration and proclamations of natural rights substitute for effective legislation. In his Reflection on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke a believer in natural law who nonetheless denied that the "rights of Man" could be derived from it, criticized the drafters of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen proclaiming the "monstrous fiction" of human equality, which he argued serves but to inspire false ideas and vain expectations in men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life. Bentham, one of the founders of Utilitarianism and a non-believer was no less scornful. "Rights," he wrote is "the child of law, from real law come real rights, but from imaginary laws, from law of nature come imaginary rights" Natural rights are simple nonsense, natural and imprescriptible rights (an American phrase), rhetorical nonsense, nonsense upon stilts, he added. Hume agreed with Bentham natural law and natural rights, he insisted are unreal metaphysical phenomena. This assault upon natural law and natural rights, thus begun during the late 18th century both intensified and broadened during the 19th centuty and early 20th centuries. John Stuart Mill, despite his vigorous defense of liberty, proclaimed that rights ultimately are founded on utility or effecetiveness. The German jurist Friedrich Karl von Savigny, England's Sir Henry Maine and other historicalists emphasized that rights are a function of cultural and environmental variables uniwque to particular communities, and the jurist John Austin and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein insisted respectively, that the only law is "the command of the sovereign" and that the only truth is that which can be established by verifiable or can be supported by experience. By the World War I, there were scarcely any theorists who would or could defend the "rights of Man" along the lines of natural law. Indeed under the influence of 19th century German Idealism, and parallel expression of rising European Nationalism, there were some, the Marxists, for example, who although not rejecting individual rights altogether maintained that rights from whatever source derived, belong to communities or whole societies and nations preeminently. Consequently did F.H. Bradley, the British Idealist, write in 1894: " The write of the individual are today not worth serious consideration The welfare of the community is the end and is the ultimate standard." Yet though the heyday or the zenith of natural rights proved short the idea of human rights however endured in one form or another. The abolition of slavery, factory legislation, popular education, trade unionism, the universal suffrage movement, these and other examples of 19th century reformist impulse afford ample evidence that the idea was not to be extinguished even if it is trans-empirical derivation had become a matter of general skepticism, but it was not until the rise and fall of Nazi Germany that the idea of rights- human rights- came truly into its own. The laws authorizing the dispossession and extermination of Jews and other minorities, the laws permitting arbitrary police search and seizure, the laws condoning imprisonment, torture and execution without public trial, these and similar obscenities brought home the realization that law and morality, if they are o be deserving of the name cannot be grounded in any purely Utilitarian, Idealist or other consequentialist doctrine. Certain actions are wrong no matter what; human beings are entitled to simple respect at least. Today the enormous majority of legal scholars, philosophers, and moralists agree, irrespective of culture or civilization that every human being is entitled at least of in theory, to some basic rights. Heir to the Protestant Reformation and to the English, American, French, Mexican, Russian and Chinese revolutions, the last half of the 20th century has seen in the words of human rights scholars Louis Henkin, "essentially universal acceptance of human rights in principle, such no government dares to dissent from ideology of human rights today. Indeed except for some essentially isolated 19th century demonstrations of international humanitarian concern to be noted below, the last half of the of the 20th century may fairly be said tom mark the birth of the international as well as the universal recognition of human rights. In the treaty establishing the United Nations (UN), all members pledged themselves to take joint and separate action for the achievement of "universal respect for, and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion." In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), representatives from many diverse cultures endorsed the rights therein set forth "as a common standard of achievement for all people and all nations," and in 1976, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political rights each approved by the UN General Assembly in 1966, entered into force and effect. As an assumption, whatever the current attitudes and policies of government, the reality of popular demands for human rights including both greater economic justice and greater political freedom, is beyond debate. A deepening and widening concern for the promotion and protection of human rights hastened by the self-determinist impulse of a post-colonial era is now obviously woven into the fabric of contemporary world affairs. Substantially responsible for this progressive development has been, of course the work of the United Nations, its allied agencies and such regional organizations as the Council of Europe, the Organization of American States and the Organization of African Unity, and other people who have the heart and quest for the true meaning of Human Rights. So we may therefore conclude that it is certain there are palpable (capable of being perceived; especially capable of being handled or touched or felt) concern for the advancement of human right is here to stay, even there are some formidable obstacles attends the endeavors of Human Right. Bibliography The University of Chicago. Compton's Encyclopedia volume 10 (H-Hypno), 1991 edition, Chicago: A Britannica Publication, c1991. The New Encyclopedia Britannica, Macropedia, Knowledge in Depth, volume 20 (G-I), 15th edition, Auckland: Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., c1994. Aruego, Jose M. and Torres Gloria A. Principles of Political Science.1981 edition, Manila: University Book Supply Inc. c1981. Brownlie, Ian. Basic Documents on Human Rights, 2nd edition, c1981. Read More