Modern

Theories
Of
Human Rights
 Theories of Human Rights

Rights based on Natural Rights

Rights based on Justice
Rights based on reaction to injustice
Rights based on dignity
Rights based on equality of respect and concern
Rights based on cultural relativism
 Theories of Human rights

Introduction :-
To understand the concept of Human Rights, there are
several theories by different philosophers.
 Rights based on Natural rights

 Underlying such foundational or core rights theory is the

omnipresence of Immanuel Kant’s compelling ethics. Kant’s
ethics maintains that person’s typically have different desires
and ends, so any principle derived from them can only be
contingent.
 Kant’s great imperative is that the central focus of morality is
personhood, namely the capacity to take responsibility as a free
and rational agent for one’s system of end.
 Rights based on Natural rights

 Kant’s theory overrides all arbitrary distinctions of race, creed

and custom and universal in nature.
 Article 1 of UDHR provides :- “ All Human beings are born free
and equal in dignity”. The debt that “inherent dignity” and
“inalienable rights” owe to natural law philosophy is obvious.
 Rights based on Justice

 The thesis of modern philosophy is John Rawls' “A Theory of

Justice”. Justice is the first virtue of social institutions,“. Human
rights, of course, are an end of justice; hence, the role of justice
is crucial to understanding human rights.
 No theory of Human Rights for a domestic or international order
in Modern Society can be advanced today without considering
Rawls’ thesis.
 Rights based on Justice

 According to Rawls’ :- Principle of justice, provide a way of

assigning rights and duties in the basic institutions of society.
 In a society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken and
secured by justice.
 Rawls’ first principle :- “Each person is to have an equal right to
the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties
compatible with a similar system of liberty for all”.
 Rawls’ second principle :- Social and economic inequalities are
to be arranged so that the general conception of justice behind
these principles reached in the original position.
 Rights based on reaction to injustice

 Professor Edmund Cahn’s theory of Justice.

 Cahn asserts that although there may be universal a priori truths
concerning justice from which one may deduce rights or norms,
it is better to approach justice from its negative rather than its
affirmative side.
 Justice means the active process of remedying or preventing
what would arouse the sense of injustice
 Rights based on Dignity

 A number of human rights theorists have tried to construct a

comprehensive system of human rights norms based on a value-
policy oriented approach focused on the protection of human
dignity.

 McDougal, Lasswell, and Chen proceed on the premise that

demands for human rights are demands for wide sharing in all
the values upon which human rights depend :-
 Rights based on Dignity

1. Respect
2. Power
3. Enlightenment
4. Well-being
5. Health
6. Skill
7. Affection
8. Recttude
 Rights based on Equality of respect & Concern

 Ronald Dworkin, who offers a promising reconciliation theory

between natural rights and utilitarian theories.
 Dworkin proceeds from the postulate of political morality, i.e.,
that governments must treat all their citizens with equal concern
and respect. No basis for any valid discourse on rights and
claims exists in the absence of such a premise.
 utilitarian principle that "everybody can count for one, nobody
for more than one."
 Rights based on Cultural Relativism

 no human rights principles can be said to be self-evident and

recognized in all times and all places.
 Moral relativism is not very influential in modern philosophy,
but cultural relativism has been used frequently as an argument
against the universality of human rights.
 no human rights are absolutes, that the principles that one may
use for judging behavior are relative to the society in which one
is raised, and that all cultures are morally equal or valid.