Human Rights and the Relational Self: A Personalist Approach

Abstract

Drawing on insights from both secular and religious sources, including the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition and the Confucian Relational Self, the author presents a heuristic framework for a personalist relational philosophy (“PRP”) of human rights that can serve as a basis for global values and universal norms in a culturally diverse and pluralistic world. Human beings are both particular and universal, the one and the many, the self and the other, the subject and object of human rights and duties, of love and responsibility. The PRP presented here, underpinned by a realist anthropology and a critical-realist axiology, suggests how a holistic shift to the embodied relational self within a virtue-based personalist ethic of care can profoundly affect the clinical practice of bio-medicine and bio-ethics but also, inter alia, the ways in which the law structures rights and rights structure relationships and vice versa. This is part of an on-going search for an integral ecology, hermeneutics and praxis of human rights.