Human Rights: Evolution and Core Principles
The Relationship of Morality to the Law
Respect for human dignity can be secured only if it becomes a duty required of everyone, not just morally, but also legally.
- A moral imperative: It depends on the conscience of the individual.
- A legal requirement: It enforces the individual from outside.
Life cannot be organized only with the moral conscience of the people; it needs an external force that compels us to act.
Human Rights and Guaranteeing Respect for Human Dignity
Human rights are fundamental rights that protect our dignity as persons. They constitute the regulatory framework that ensures respect for human dignity in democratic societies.
The Ideal of Human Rights
- The doctrine of human rights: Intended as the foundation of a universal ethic. This doctrine has been clearly articulated for 200 years. Its formulation is as follows: Any human being has a basic right that everyone has the obligation to respect. The most fundamental rights include the right to life, liberty, security, and equality before the law.
- Early formulations of the doctrine of human rights: It came more than two centuries ago. It has gained ground. In this process, the conception of what constitutes human rights has been evolving: it has become more extensive and deeper.
- The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: In the late 18th century, the idea began to form that every human being has an inalienable dignity and rights that nobody can take away. In this era, there was a push to establish representative governments. In 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was adopted.
- Some human rights were still limited: That statement favored progress for the time. It recognized the sanctity of certain inviolable rights and established the principle that men are born and remain free. This doctrine had notable gaps. Women had to wait less than a century to begin to be recognized.
The Extension of Human Rights
It was gaining acceptance throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and was applied to sectors of the population, becoming more extensive.
- Civil rights are negative or defensive rights: They should serve to prevent political power from improperly interfering in people’s lives.
- Political rights: Allow citizens to involve themselves in public matters, and they are positive rights that are the foundation of any democratic system.
- Social rights: They try to combine economic development with social justice through society as a whole, providing for the most disadvantaged sectors of the population.
Vocabulary
- Stoicism: Ethical theory according to which we must act according to reason, which tells us what our duty is, through our willingness, enabling us to fulfill it.
- Passions: The impulses, emotions, feelings, and desires that reason and the will have to master.
- Duty: The moral obligation that reason dictates we will have to assume.
- Categorical imperative: Duty to act only on a maxim that we want to become a universal law.
- Ethics of knowledge: It is that which considers the supreme moral criterion for action to be respect for duty.
- Human dignity: The inviolable value that we attach to every human being with respect to its sound, free, and responsible condition.
- Respect: Special consideration is granted to certain realities for what they embody.
- Moral habit: Acquired through regular performances under a certain moral standard.
- Sense of duty: The feeling of obligation that accompanies the coexistence of duty.
- Autonomy: Ability to govern ourselves according to moral standards defined by ourselves, using our reason and will.
- Heteronomy: Condition governing moral norms imposed by factors beyond one’s own reason and moral will.
- Moral commitment: The support everyone feels obliged to give, in practice, to causes deemed fair.