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Perry on Secular & Religious Worldviews and the Morality of Human Rights

By Lawrence Solum

Michael J. Perry (Emory University School of Law) has posted Secular Worldviews, Religious Worldviews, and the Morality of Human Rights (THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO THEISM, Charles Taliaferro, Steven Goetz & Victoria S. Harrison, eds., Routledge, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The morality of human rights - i.e., the foundational, connected moral claims articulated in the International Bill of Human Rights - coheres well with some religious worldviews. For example, and as philosopher Charles Taylor has explained, the ?affirmation of universal human rights [that characterizes] modern liberal political culture [represents an] authentic development[] of the gospel . . .? But does the morality of human rights also cohere, well or otherwise, with any secular worldview: any worldview that denies or is agnostic about the existence of a ?transcendent? reality, as distinct from the reality that is the object of natural-scientific inquiry? Put another way: Are secular worldviews and the morality of human rights like oil and water?

This is an essay in human rights theory. (This is a brief essay, given its intended venue; see below.) In it, I explicate the morality of human rights and then address the question articulated in the preceding paragraph. Along the way, I note recent work in human rights theory by religious human-rights theorist Nicholas Wolterstorff ("Justice: Rights and Wrongs") and secular human-rights theorist James Griffin ("On Human Rights").

In this essay, I build on an argument I began in The Idea of Human Rights (Oxford, 1998) and continued, in revised form, in Toward a Theory of Human Rights (Cambridge, 2007).

For a recent essay on the problématique to which my argument is a response - an essay that discusses my argument - see Daniel Malachuk, "Human Rights and a Post-Secular Religion of Humanity," Journal of Human Rights 9.2 (June 2010). Another recent, quite relevant discussion: John Dobard, "The Inheritance of Excellence: On the Uses, Justification, and Problem of Human Dignity," http://ssrn.com/abstract=1580548.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on May 28, 2010 (boomark / email).