The Idea of Human Rights

Inspired by a 1988 trip to El Salvador Michael J. Perry''s new book is a personal and scholarly exploration of the idea of human rights. Perry is one of our nation''s leading authorities on the relation of morality including religious morality to politics and law. He seeks in this book to disentangle the complex idea of human rights by way of four probing and interrelated essays. * The initial essay which is animated by Perry''s skepticism about the capacity of any secular morality to offer a coherent account of the idea of human rights suggests that the first part of the idea of human rights--the premise that every human being is sacred or inviolable--is inescapably religious. * Responding to recent criticism of rights talk Perry explicates in his second essay the meaning and value of talk about human rights. * In his third essay Perry asks a fundamental question about human rights: Are they universal? In addressing this question he disaggregates and criticizes several different varieties of moral relativism and then considers the implications of these different relativist positions for claims about human rights. * Perry turns to another fundamental question about human rights in his final essay: Are they absolute? He concludes that even if no human rights understood as moral rights are absolute or unconditional some human rights understood as international legal rights are--and indeed should be--absolute. In the introduction Perry writes: Of all the influential--indeed formative--moral ideas to take center stage in the twentieth century like democracy and socialism the idea of human rights (which again in one form or another is an old idea) is for many the most difficult. It is the most difficult in the sense that it is for many the hardest of the great moral ideas to integrate the hardest to square with the reigning intellectual assumptions of the age especially what Bernard Williams has called ''Nietzsche''s thought'': ''There is not only no God but no metaphysical order of any kind....'' For those who accept ''Nietzsche''s thought'' can the idea of human rights possibly be more than a kind of aesthetic preference? In a culture in which it was widely believed that there is no God or metaphysical order of any kind on what basis if any could the idea of human rights long survive? The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries will appeal to students of many disciplines including (but not limited to) law philosophy religion and politics. Of all the influential--indeed formative--moral ideas to occupy centre stage in the twentieth century the notion of human rights is for many the most difficult.