Human Rights are rights that belong to an individual or group of individuals as a consequence of being human. They refer to a wide continuum of values or capabilities thought to enhance human agency and declared to be universal in character, in some sense equally claimed for all human beings. It is a common observation that human beings everywhere demand the realization of diverse values or capabilities to ensure their individual and collective well-being.
It also is a common observation that this demand is often painfully frustrated by social s well as natural forces, resulting in exploitation, oppression, persecution, and other forms of deprivation. Deeply rooted In these twin observations are the beginnings of what today are called “human rights” and the national and International legal processes that are associated with them.
In part because Systoles played a key role In Its formation and spread, Roman law similarly allowed for the existence of a natural law and with It–pursuant to the Jus genetic (“law of universal rights that extended beyond the rights that which nature, not the state, assures to all human beings, Roman citizens or not. It was not until after the middle Ages, however, that natural law became associated with natural rights. In Greece-Roman and medieval times, doctrines of natural law concerned mainly the duties, rather than the rights, of “Man. ” Moreover, as evidenced in the writings of Aristotle and SST.
Thomas Aquinas, these doctrines recognized the legitimacy of slavery and serfdom and, in so doing, excluded perhaps the most important ideas of human rights as they are understood today–freedom (or liberty) and equality. For the idea of human rights qua natural rights to gain general recognition, therefore, retain basic societal changes were necessary, changes of the sort that took place gradually, beginning with the decline of European feudalism from about the 13th century and continuing through the Renaissance to the Peace of Westphalia (1648).
During this period, resistance to religious intolerance and political and economic bondage; the evident failure of rulers to meet their obligations under natural law; and the unprecedented commitment to individual expression and worldly experience that was characteristic of the Renaissance all combined to shift the conception of natural law from duties to rights. The teachings of Aquinas and Hugo Grottos on the European continent, and the Magna Cart (121 5), the Petition of Right of 1628, and the English Bill of Rights (1689) in England, were proof of this change.
The intellectual–and especially the scientific–achievements of the 17th century (including the materialism of Hobbes, the rationalism of Descartes and Leibniz, the pantheism of Spinal, and the empiricism of Bacon and 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 the more comprehensive expression of this belief.
Particularly important were the writings of John Locke, arguably the most important natural-law theorist of modern times, and the works of the 18th-century philosophies centered mainly in Paris, including Nonentities, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Locke argued in detail, mainly in writings associated with the English Revolution of 1688 (the “Glorious Revolution”), that certain rights self-evidently pertain to individuals as human beings (because these rights existed in “the state of nature” before humankind entered civil society); that chief among them are the rights to life, liberty (freedom from arbitrary rule), and repertory; that, upon entering civil society, humankind surrendered to the state– the rights themselves; and that the state’s failure to secure these rights gives rise to a right to responsible, popular revolution.
The philosophies, building on Locke and others and embracing many and varied currents of thought with a common supreme faith in reason, vigorously attacked religious and scientific dogmatism, intolerance, censorship, and social and economic restraints. They sought to discover and act upon universally valid principles governing nature, humanity, and society, including the inalienable “rights of Man,” which they treated as a fundamental ethical and social gospel. Not surprisingly, this liberal intellectual ferment exerted a profound influence in the Western world of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
