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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| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
1999
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| In: |
Journal of law and religion
Year: 1999, Volume: 14, Issue: 1, Pages: 67-76 |
| Further subjects: | B
Book review
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| 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." |
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| ISSN: | 2163-3088 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of law and religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.2307/1051778 |