Open AccessInnate rights and just relations 1
Author(s) -
Paul Marshall
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
koers
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.166
H-Index - 5
eISSN - 2304-8557
pISSN - 0023-270X
DOI - 10.4102/koers.v56i2.737
Subject(s) - promulgation , human rights , relation (database) , law and economics , individualism , law , political science , politics , reservation of rights , fundamental rights , international human rights law , sociology , right to property , computer science , database
Currently the terms rights is and human rights are used to refer to two types of entities. One is a kind of legal claim or guarantee given in positive law. The other is a purported moral claim or interest implicit in the nature of human persons. A peculiar feature of modem discussions of rights is that these diverse things are commonly treated as if they had some necessary relation to one another. In fact, historically and conceptually, they do not and the frequent attempts to relate them can have inimical results. It can confuse substantive human rights with the promulgation of an individualist view of the person. The defence of human rights (of the types now mentioned in international treaties) would be helped by divorcing these from a notion of innate rights and, instead, understanding rights as legal guarantees of just political relations