Gee’s Reviews > Beyond Human Rights > Status Update

the discourse concerning human rights is given straightaway as a moral certainty, as a universal truth, considered to impose itself everywhere by the fact of its universality alone. Its value does not thus depend on a democratic ratification. Better still, it can oppose it

If all men are equal, if they are all fundamentally the same, if they are all ‘men like others’, far from the unique personality of each of them being able to be recognised, they will appear, not as irreplaceable, but on the contrary as interchangeable.

If the men should be left free to do what they want as long as the use of their freedom does not encroach upon that of the others, why could not peoples of whom certain customs appear to us shocking or condemnable be left free to practice them as long as they do not seek to impose them on others?

If the rights have been ‘there’ always, present in the very nature itself of man, one may be surprised that only a small portion of humanity has perceived it, and that it has taken it so long to be perceived. How does one understand that the universal character of rights appeared as something ‘evident’ only in a particular society?

‘To attribute a special value or special rights to the members of the human species based on the sole fact that they are members of it’, writes Elvio Baccarini, ‘is a morally arbitrary position which cannot be distinguished from sexism, racism or ethnocentrism’.

We know that, historically, dignity, attributed to everybody, has replaced honour, which is only present in some

Law is what I must obey. It may confer on me certain benefits, here the immunity that my life, too, is to be respected; but fundamentally I am under law. By contrast, a subjective right is something which the possessor can and ought to act on to put it into effect.

They are on the verge of replacing, in a hegemonic manner, all sorts of political and social discourses which formerly were articulated from the point of view of notions that are today worn out or discredited (tradition, nation, progress, revolution), as well as of becoming the sole compass of a disoriented epoch, and of supplying a minimal morality to a world in disarray