Review Essay a Secular View of Human Rights

Michael J. Perry's The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries is a major contribution to the clarification of the idea of human rights, which he considers to be, for many, the most difficult of all the influential moral ideas to take center stage in the twentieth century. He argues that it is, &q...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Lerner, Nātān 1925- (Author)
Format: Electronic Review
Language:English
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Published: Cambridge Univ. Press 1999
In: Journal of law and religion
Year: 1999, Volume: 14, Issue: 1, Pages: 67-76
Further subjects:B Book review
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Summary:Michael J. Perry's The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries is a major contribution to the clarification of the idea of human rights, which he considers to be, for many, the most difficult of all the influential moral ideas to take center stage in the twentieth century. He argues that it is, "in one form or another," an "old idea" and opens his Introduction with a quotation from Leszek Kolakowski dismissing the assertion that "the idea of human rights is of recent origin." For someone who is as ready to admit being a "secular enthusiast of human rights" as the author of this comment, Perry's denial of the fact that human rights constitute a recent phenomenon certainly "poses a problem." The problem is really essential with regard to Perry's foundational conviction advanced in Chapter I, where he claims that the idea of human rights is ineliminably, inescapably, religious, and that so is the view that "every human being is sacred."
ISSN:2163-3088
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of law and religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.2307/1051778