Rightlessness Arendt And Arendt's Theory Of Human Rights

“Ideas about human rights have evolved over many centuries. But they achieved strong international support following the Holocaust and World War II. To protect future generations from a repeat of these horrors, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 and invited states to sign and ratify it”

As per the 1948 Universal announcement of human rights, all individuals regardless of their background are all born equal before the law. This declaration made by the powerful nations and signed by all nations strong and weak that belong to the United Nations reflects the thoughts of many earlier philosophers to include the 16th & 17th Century Martin Luther, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke. However, each philosopher -based on their times and experiences gave a different value to how men use their freedom and equality in presence of the other in a society, and in relation to political authority. As determinant of his freedom to act and think, the three writings focused on the will of man, the promise that shapes the social contract, and the

The Public Realm involves the interaction between individuals, specifically in the form of politics. The freedom of necessity is a major component in Arendt’s description of the Public Realm. Within this realm, social interaction and politics are carried out in the form of Arendt’s third and most important human activity, action. Arendt defines all social and political interactions as a form of Action because they require one person to share an idea or thought through two means. Firstly the individual must be able to verbalize his or her thoughts. “In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.” (Arendt, 179) The second requirement is a personal identity. Because of this requirement, all of the necessities for life must be dealt with prior to action. Without the freedom of life’s necessities humans are nothing more than animals slaving away with no regard to anything greater than survival.

Cohen defines rights as “a claim that one party may exercise against another”(339). He explains that there are many different types of rights: some moral, some legal; some held by a single person, others held by groups; all differing in what the right entitles one to. Above all this, however, Cohen stresses that rights are a concept rooted in morality. They arise out of the necessity for self-governance among a community, providing standards of conduct that beget personal protection and safety. Therefore, the argument continues that the holders of rights must only be those who are capable of comprehending such concepts as morality and duty and right against wrong. After all, standards can only be held to subjects capable of understanding and achieving them. Because humans are the only

All men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the

(pg. 290) The Rights of man is stated “to be “inalienable,” irreducible to and undeducible from other rights or laws.” (pg.291) When the Right of Man, apparently “inalienable, proved to be unenforceable”, (pg. 293) are for those of the stateless populations. Those that are rightless suffered two losses. They suffered from the loss of their homes and the loss of the government protection. The losses are considered to be not to be regained once again. The overall conclusion of these losses leads to “the explusion from humanity altogether.” (pg. 297) Since the law doesn’t exist for the stateless populations, the losses lead to a state of absolute rightlessness. It relates to that of the Jewish people throughout the Nazi regime who experienced a succession of deprivation of many of their

Rather than striving to criticize the basis (or lack thereof) for natural rights, as Burke does, Bentham writes against natural rights by criticizing their written formalisms and the implications that need follow them. Specifically, Bentham goes through the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and attacks the aspects of some passages with which he takes issue. While the technique of reading the French Declaration completely literally and ignoring the potential of any aspirational aspects of the human rights tradition borders on fallacy in its own right, Bentham’s specific criticisms do ask questions that the thinkers both before and after him struggled to answer – chiefly with regards to the epistemic basis for human rights. For instance, Bentham criticizes the language of Article 1 by declaring absurd the notions of universal freedom and equality in rights at birth (121). Further, and more consequentially, he attacks the idea from Article 2 that the government should exist solely to protect these individual natural rights (122), a logical step considering that Bentham disputes the existence of these natural rights at all. Furthermore, he views the attempted application of human rights ideals as dangerous to society and security, for the unsubstantiated claims of members of the human rights tradition give some form of legitimacy to those who would seek to supplant established government

One of the main reasons why human rights have been put in place is to protect the public life and public space of every individual being. One fundamental characteristic of human rights is that they are equal rights; they are aimed at providing protection to every person in an equal way. These rights have been entrenched through laws that are passed by states and international conventions. Human rights laws have evolved over time, and have been shaped by several factors, including philosophical theories in the past. This paper looks at the theories of two philosophers, Emmanuel Kant and John Stuart Mills, and how their teachings can be used to explain the sources of human rights. Kant’s moral philosophy is very direct in its

today we call them human rights" (McShea 34). The issue of whether or not to

The doctrine of human rights were created to protect every single human regardless of race, gender, sex, nationality, sexual orientation and other differences. It is based on human dignity and the belief that no one has the right to take this away from another human being. The doctrine states that every ‘man’ has inalienable rights of equality, but is this true? Are human rights universal? Whether human rights are universal has been debated for decades. There have been individuals and even countries that oppose the idea that human rights are for everybody. This argument shall be investigated in this essay, by: exploring definitions and history on human rights, debating on whether it is universal while providing examples and background

For Aristotle the human is "by nature" destined to live in a political association. Yet not all who live in the political association are citizens, and not all citizens are given equal share in the power of association. The idea of Polity is that all citizens should take short turns at ruling (VII, 1332 b17-27). It is an inclusive form of government: everyone has a share of political power. Aristotle argues that citizen are those who are able to participate in the deliberative and judicial areas of government (III, 1279a32-34). However, not all who live in a political association are citizens. Women, children, slaves, and alien residents are not citizens. Some groups; the rich, the poor, those who

In her classic work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt articulates a vision of totalitarianism that is juxtaposed against her own conceptions of freedom and the purpose of humanity. In this contrasting however, she ignores her own recognition that the meanings of such concepts are intimately tied with the narrative of a given society or group. As a result, this essay will argue that Arendt’s claim that totalitarianism destroys freedom as a living political reality is unjustified, and that instead totalitarianism gives a meaning to freedom that is informed by the collapse of ultimate concepts such as the law of History and the law of Nature into the sphere of man. To show this, we will explore the way Arendt lays the seeds of the

The most important comparison is between a decent society and a just society. Every just society must be a decent one but the opposite does not apply. Only a society with notion of rights can have a concept of self-respect. A decent society is one that does not violate the rights of people dependent on it. The question is which rights have to be honoured by an institution of a society for it to be considered a decent one? The violation of which rights provides a sufficient condition for humiliation? The answer is that it is a minimal condition for people’s freedom of action, without which they could not be considered moral agents. Human rights are symptoms for identifying human

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” These opening words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights express a concept of man which underpins the framework of human rights embodied in the Universal Declaration and the two international covenants of Human Rights. Western political traditions is a concept that it derives from, is in harmony with moral and social teachings to be found in many other traditions and patterns of belief.

The origen and the content of human rights, as they are presented by the Declaration of 1948, belong to a concrete cultural and political tradition, that is, the Western,liberal, individualistic and democratic tradition. But such