Understanding Human Rights: Democracy, Ethics, and Social Movements
There Is No Democracy Without Freedom
Rights of the Person
- Freedom of opinion and ideas
- Collective freedoms of assembly, association, advocacy of political ideas, and religion
- Freedom of education
- Freedom of enterprise
Rights of Persons
The right to life, integrity, and security is the foundation of all other rights. Specific duties:
- Legal rights
- Civil rights
- Economic and labor rights
- Cultural rights
- Right to health and to have an adequate environment
- Right to protection of children, the elderly, etc.
All rights imply duties and obligations that we assume.
Utilitarian Ethics
Jeremy Bentham founded utilitarian ethics. He rejected the concept of natural rights. Pleasure and pain were the only basis on which legislation could be built rationally. He thought that ethics and politics were governed by the principle of utility, which should be aimed at the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. To Bentham, natural rights had no foundation. The principle of utility provided an agenda to evaluate the goodness or badness of laws.
Marxism and Human Rights
Marx, the chief theoretician of socialism and communism, argued that natural rights are the rights of egoistic man, considered at the margin of society. Marx saw society as a natural entity. He saw the theories of natural law as an expression of the dominant class’s interests. Liberalism masked inequalities of class society.
The Working Class
With the Industrial Revolution, the working class, the proletariat, was born. Throughout the nineteenth century, the most important and influential social movement of modern times emerged. The absence of any civil, political, and professional rights for the proletariat proved the insufficiency of the rights proclaimed in 1789 and fostered the first associations and the first workers’ strikes.
New Demands, New Rights
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, there were communist or socialist groups. The new Marxist ideology proposed to convert the properties that were in the hands of the bourgeois minority into ownership of the whole society. The labor movement has had a huge influence on social changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the modern definition of human rights.
Human Rights
In the declaration of 1948, the concept of natural rights was replaced by human rights.
Human rights are a particular type of entitlement. We possess them by the fact of being human, not because they are secured by any particular law of the country we live in (legal rights). Therefore:
- Human rights are the same for everyone: one can be human or not; whoever is human has the same rights as any other human being.
- They are inalienable: you cannot stop being human, no matter how badly a person behaves or how brutally one is treated.
- They are universal in the following sense: we believe that human beings are all members of the species Homo sapiens.
Rights discourse leads us to the person who possesses the rights of which I speak. This distinguishes having the right to enjoy a benefit or being a beneficiary of the obligation of another.