Meaning of Human Rights in Western Philosophy

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Human Rights play a vital role in the battle against oppression. Cultural relativist reporters of human rights argue that they can be used as a mechanism of oppression itself. They view universal rights as insensate to cultural dissimilarity. Some developing states call the human rights strategy a new form of western imperialism.

The Universalist theory of Human Rights is based on Western philosophy and the rate it places on the individual.  Product of Greek philosophy, Christianity and the Enlightenment thinkers, the Universalist method to Human Rights contends that one can use character, God, or reason to identify basic rights, innate to every human, which pre-exist society.  Jack Donnelly best abridge the contemporary doctrine of the Universalist approach by putting forward the following finale:

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1.     All individual have rights by virtue of their humanity;

2.     A personnel rights cannot be conditioned by gender or national or ethnic origin;

3.     Human Rights subsist universally as the highest moral rights, so no rights can be subordinated to another person or an institution.

By comparison, cultural relativism is based on the thought that there are no objectives principles by which others can be determine.    Relativism was formed by, among others, the sophist Protagoras.  He rejected objective truth by utter in so many words, later quoted by Plato:

“The way things appear to me, in that way they exist for me and the way things appear to you, in that way they exist for you.”

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