1998 is the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1946 UNESCO sent a questionnaire to statesmen, philosophers and scholars asking them to make a list of human rights.Thinkers like Richard McKeon of the University of Chicago,  France's Jacques Maritain and others then produced such a list. 

UNESCO submitted their catalog of human rights to Eleanor Roosevelt's United Nations Committee which then drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This text, with its Preamble, Declaration and Thirty Articles does not impose on  member states of the United Nations a direct obligation to defend those rights. Rather the UDHR offers a moral vision for civilized living. The UN General Assembly has since presented to national governments for ratification treaties or "conventions" to enforce some of these human rights .

The Universal Declaration lays out many rights: both the old political and legal freedoms and the newer social and economic claims by "everyone" to fairness, dignity and justice.

Someone in 1946 asked the philosopher Jacques Maritain, "did you people  from so many different cultures and religions really agree on what rights all people everywhere have?" Maritain replied: "Yes we agree about the rights, but on condition no one asks us why."

Eleanor Roosevelt's Universal Declaration did not probe for the ultimate source of our human rights. Rather, the UDHR  simply makes rights inhere in the human PERSON, not in the atomized, utterly self-sufficient rugged INDIVIDUAL dear to many American thinkers. A PERSON  exists in and is fulfilled by GROUPS, beginning with family, friendships, neighborhoods and moving upward into ever more complex associations. A person has duties to others as well as rights for herself. All persons have HUMAN DIGNITY.  Dignity is the key.
Dignity is as close to a source for all human rights as the UDHR comes.

The Universal Declaration of 1948 does not probe the deeper sources of that dignity. Politically, pragmatically that silence is wise. Given so many traditions: theist, deist, sceptical, contractual, eastern, western, altruistic, self-seeking, etc., there is not and cannot be universal consensus on what gives persons their inalienable rights.

Here is a sketch of seven well known, widely debated proposed sources of human rights. Four of these sources are in an inter-related class by themselves: reason, human nature, nature and God. These four sources are held to be objectively true, not a product of human will or fantasizing.

We might argue that dispassionate, objective REASON leads our thoughts to HUMAN NATURE as the carrier of human rights. With Aristotle we first take a long look at human beings.  We discover human persons as coming in two sexes, producing young which mature much more slowly than other animals. We see people able to think, communicate, love and create. We then argue that we have a right to everything which our human nature requires us to possess
in order to live a full, happy life with others in society. Theories of
NATURAL LAW are also spun off by this approach.

Others think that ALL NATURE and not just human nature grounds man's basic rights. Thomas Hobbes was in this category. He argued that every spatial body must either stay in motion or die. For people, staying in motion means remaining alive: breathing, eating and so on. As a part of nature I have a right to expect others to let me live, to keep moving. To protect myself Ican contract with others to create a mighty coercive power, a Leviathan, to keep all humans securely alive.

But nature is limited, contingent, finite. Nature does not explain its own
existence. For this explanation most people reach beyond nature to an
uncreated, omnipotent, wise, caring GOD (or GODS). The Divine creator gives humans their dignity. In some traditions the emphasis is on what we humans can know of God with unaided reason. Other traditions say that God or Yahweh or Allah has revealed far more of himself through sacred writings than we can ever know or understand without the aid of his self-revelation.

A second "subjective" set of three explanations of human rights seems
incompatible with any of the four "objective" explanations above. People who hold one or more of these three views argue that human rights are invented arbitrarily. Human rights are pure PROJECTIONS of our inner wishes. How nice, for example,  it would be if everyone had a living wage and all the leisure which she needed! In a further stage, groups of people voluntarily agree to STIPULATE that these dreams and imaginings shall be called human rights and that we should all strive to realize them. This is because human rights are beautiful or useful or conducive to peace or promote some other desired human goal. At the state level an autocratic ruler might define certain rights and compel all to acknowledge these rights, whether we agree or not. In America this subjective, POSITIVE LAW or "MAN-MADE LAW" approach dominates universities. People with this mind set are likely to assert, for instance, that all women have a right to destroy human life in their wombs.  At the same time some members of this persuasion recoil in horror from female athletes at a Buncombe County high school who have voted to call their sports teams "Squaws." The same girls who are said to have a right to conceive a child outside matrimony and to destroy that child in the womb without consulting father or parents are conceded no right to call themselves by a name which  may be offensive to some but is lethal to none.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights embraces none of the seven theories above. Neither does it reject any. Rather the UDHR gives human rights a simple framework built on two concepts. Those are   

(1) the PERSON, who needs association with other persons and  

(2) that person's DIGNITY.

Professor Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard University Law School calls the linking of PERSON and DIGNITY the UDHR's "proto-justification" of human rights. Proto-justification is a first baby step into a vast arena of speculation. If, however,  without further probing, you simply accept the PERSONHOOD and the DIGNITY of all persons, then you also buy into a very rich world of human rights. The person and his dignity make up a creative, open-ended, cross-cultural matrix which buoys up human rights. The Universal Declaration is grounded neither in theology, nor in philosophy nor in any one culture's anthropology.

Most of us non philosophers probably simply choose sides. In the USA 90% of more people embrace all or part of the first set of  four objective sources of human rights sketched above: 

(reason, 
human nature, 
nature, 
God). 

The second collection of subjective explanations: 


(pure projection by the ego,
voluntary contracts,  
coercion by governmental positive law)


is embraced by
5% or fewer. But that tiny minority proclaim their theories confidently, loudly, incessantly and give the impression of having far more adherents than they have.

Be it also remembered that a third handful of Americans are nihilists,
sceptics, monists and the like who believe in no human rights, no human nature, no ability to know truth when it presents itself.  Jacques Maritain would counsel us to be content. If 90% of Americans agree on most of the freedoms in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that is good enough for practical living.

On the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration, let us be thankful for what consensus we have.

-OOO-

for Asheville TRIBUNE