Human rights, philosophy and ethics

Abstract

Human rights offer us fundamental standards that aim at leading a life with dignity. Naturally, there is an intimate relationship between human rights and philosophy. The Ancient Greeks considered ‘just’ things to be natural things, and natural rights to be true. In this chapter we explore the relationship between philosophy, ethics and human rights. We will discuss human rights as a philosophical concept that has developed since these Ancient Greek philosophers, and the idea that the Enlightenment thinkers were crucial in shaping the contours for an understanding of modern human rights, as well as how to organise a modern state built on fundamental rights. We then consider the relationship between ethics and human rights, and assess how human rights play a role in both the question of ‘what should be the right thing?’ (normative ethics) as well as ‘how do people decide what is right?’ (descriptive ethics). While the language of human rights is promising and hard to disagree with, there are some serious challenges, especially in how we have organised human rights in the international arena. We need to discuss seriously how people are represented in the current human rights arsenal, what focus we choose therein, what the role of codification can be, and how to prioritise human rights in case of conflicting rights. All the more reason to also consider human rights from a bottom-up, applied perspective.