The Philosophic Bases and Material Circumstances of the Rights of Man
The Philosophic Bases and Material Circumstances of the Rights of Man

Author(s): Richard McKeon
Subject(s): International Law, Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Philosophy of Law
Published by: CEEOL Digital Reproductions / Collections
Summary/Abstract: The problems faced in framing a declaration of human rights are basically philosophic. The difficulties involved in resolving them may therefore be recognised in the paradox that the resolution of practical problems involves philosophic commitments but agreement concerning actions to be taken need not presuppose philosophic agreement. The philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries prepared the intellectual instruments by means of which bills of rights and declarations of rights were framed and, eventually, written into the constitution of most of the states of the Western World. Yet agreement in the promulgation of those declarations of rights, far from signifying a general agreement on a single basic philosophy, provided a framework within which divergent philosophies, religious, and even economic, social and political theories might be entertained and developed.

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