The Philosophical Basis for Human Rights Claims

Abstract

In the majority of cases involving the protection of human rights, the general approach is to give human rights a legal status by incorporating them into some international charter or national constitution, thereby making them justiciable. This establishes two things simultaneously. It imposes certain obligations upon those wielding political power to protect and to promote human rights among their subjects; it also confers a legitimate claim upon those ruled to have their rights respected. There is more to a human rights claim however than the fact of its legal status. It is fundamentally a moral claim imposing a moral obligation. This additional consideration is not just a mere emphasis on the legal argument. It has a specific dimension of its own that most often involves a distinct category—the moral as opposed to the merely legal. The legal aspect as we have seen is established by the fact of these rights being incorporated into some international charter or national constitution. But legality does not always imply morality. For the legal to be at the same time moral, it has to satisfy some conditions that give it a moral status making it more binding a least in conscience. The other, more fundamental, aspect of the human rights issue which gives both the legal and the moral their grounding is the human element. A legitimate claim to certain rights is based on the concept of the human being as a “person”. Only persons have rights, right meaning a certain quality or property of relationship between persons, such that one demands certain things andinsists that he or shemust have them as a matter of legitimacy. From this point of view one cannot strictly speaking, talk about the rights of animals, except in so far as these animals belong to persons. In the same way, moral claims and obligations make sense only in the context of persons. The fundamental assumptions of our human rights arguments therefore rest ultimately on the fact that human beings are persons who by virtue of their very nature have legal and moral claims that are intrinsic to them. A great deal of effort is being made to assign legal grounds to sanctions in case of their infringement. The necessity for these sanctions derives from the fact that people can recognize the moral as well as the ontological basis for human rights and yet refuse to acknowledge, respect, protect or promote them. In this particular case, the sanction imposed by law takes effect. The ideal situation however should have been the recognition as well as the promotion of the legitimate claims of the human person not because of the fear of any sanctions, but because as a human person, he or she ought to be accorded those rights. This paper will therefore try to investigate the philosophical basis for the concept of the human person upon which are founded human rights claims.