A Short History of Human Rights in the West

Michael Boylan

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139342650.005

2 - A Short History of Human Rights in the West

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014

Michael Boylan

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Michael Boylan: Affiliation:
Marymount University, Virginia

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Summary

Why should anyone care about the history of how human rights have been recognized in the Western Tradition – or anywhere else for that matter? The answer goes to the heart of this inquiry: a theory of natural human rights. If as Charles Beitz suggests, it is the case that any useful understanding of human rights originated in 1948 with the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, then the legal approach set out in Part Two of this volume becomes very plausible. Others, like James Griffin, set the origins in the Enlightenment with foreshadowing in the Middle Ages. This mirrors the historical shift to the individual over against the community perspective. If the interest approach set out in Part Two of this volume is correct, then the historical transformation of attention to the individual perspective supports the sort of rights theory that the interest approach sets out. Finally, if my agency account is correct and if human agency is roughly the same throughout human history West and East, then I should be able to demonstrate background and related concepts throughout the human record on earth. To do this systematically would be a monumental task and beyond the scope of this volume. However, some important points can be sketched out with respect to the plausibility of these claims (a lower burden of proof). I address the Western tradition in this chapter and China in the next.

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Type: Chapter
Information: Natural Human Rights
A Theory
, pp. 30 - 64

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139342650.005 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2014

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