(Wydawnictwo Naukowe Instytutu Filozofii, 2013) Pietrzykowski, Tomasz
The idea of human rights has interesting history and even
more interesting, if dim, future. The paper examines the main
conceptual problems involved in the human rights-talk, its origin
(in particular Ockham’s thought), evolution and critique (including
Bentham’s argument commonly known as “nonsense upon stilts”,
Marx’s attempt to demistify superficiality of the formal guarantees
of freedom as well as Burke’s warnings against purportedly
universal and abstract truth of such artificial ideological inventions).
The main concern for the future of the idea of human rights
seem to relate, however, to gradual naturalisation of the image
of human being and human life. Therefore, it is less and less clear
why any rights may be reasonably founded on brute fact of membership
in a given biological species. As a result, it becomes more
and more doubtful why human rights are to conceived as inherently
(conceptually) solely human privilege. Nowadays, this question
emerges as the most important challenge for the idea of human
rights in the XXI century.