What are Human Rights?
Human rights and universal human dignity are values large swaths of human society profess to hold... but why? What are human rights? And what grounds our belief in them? Can a secular naturalism do it? How? Is religious belief required? This playlist explores the history of the development of the belief in human rights and the current philosophical debate around the source of one of our most popular modern doctrines.
Curious to learn more? Watch this brief clip about human rights with professor Gilbert Meilaender.
In the late 1940s, in the
process of preparing what we now call
the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, when the U.N. after WWII
was doing that, UNESCO convened a
committee of philosophers
to try to examine
the theoretical bases - in a certain
sense, the declaration was a very
practical undertaking -
but this committee was to try to think through the
theoretical grounding of the claims that
one might make in such a declaration.
And the thing that happened was that, while
the philosophers were actually able to
agree on many of the particular claims,
they were perhaps unsurprisingly
not able to agree on WHY
they thought we should have those
commitments. That is to say, they couldn't
develop any shared vision of human nature, of
the human person, that would somehow
serve as ground
for those claims.
And Jacques Maritain, who was one of the
participating philosophers, later
recounted: "At one of the
meetings of the UNESCO
commission, where human rights were being
discussed,
someone expressed astonishment that
certain champions of violently opposed
ideologies had agreed on a list of
those rights.
'Yes,' they said,
'we agree about the rights,
but on condition that no one asks us why'."
And you can understand that, you see.
What we have here again
is a commitment to personal dignity,
a strong and deep commitment, but
the ground of which remains rather
puzzling in our minds when we're
committed to it.
Past Veritas Forums
Who are we?
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The Veritas Forum at Mayo Clinic, 2010
Ravi Zacharias, renowned speaker, writer, and apologist, addresses The Veritas Forum at Mayo Clinic on the subject of humanity. What does it mean to be human? Have we lost ourselves? And how does our answer to this question affect the way in which we live our lives?
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Why Human Dignity?
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The Veritas Forum at Mayo Clinic, 2010
Where can we find a common source of dignity? Gilbert Meiaender, professor of theology at Valparaiso University, addresses his vision for supporting human dignity in an address to The Veritas Forum at Mayo Clinic, 2010, arguing that we must distinguish between two kinds of human dignity in order really to understand what's going on.
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A Moral Climate?
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The Veritas Forum at Columbia, 2009
John Mutter, professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia, and Vinoth Ramachandra, secretary for dialogue and social engagement with IFES, Southeast Asia, discuss the moral dimensions of climate change. Is climate change an ethical issue? How? Explore the burning questions with The Veritas Forum at Columbia, 2009.
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Why Human Dignity?
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The Veritas Forum at Mayo Clinic, 2010
Robert George, professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, lays out his argument for human dignity from a natural law perspective. God, George maintains, provides the only compelling rationale for human rights—but all keen thinkers can nonetheless defend the notion. Find out how at The Veritas Forum at Mayo Clinic, 2010.
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Why Human Rights?
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The Veritas Forum at the University of Tennessee, 2009
Nicholas Wolterstorff, professor emeritus of philosophy at Yale and renowned Christian thinker, explains how he sees theism as the only hope for a coherent view of human rights. David Reidy, non-theist and head of philosophy at UT Knoxville, responds.
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