In Defense of Human Rights A Non-Religious Grounding in a Pluralistic World [Hardcover]

The argument that religion provides the only compelling foundation for human rights is both challenging and thought-provoking and answering it is of fundamental importance to the furthering of the human rights agenda.

This book establishes an equally compelling non-religious foundation for the idea of human rights, engaging with the writings of many key thinkers in the field, including Michael J. Perry, Alan Gewirth, Ronald Dworkin and Richard Rorty. Ari Kohen draws on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a political consensus of overlapping ideas from cultures and communities around the world that establishes the dignity of humans and argues that this dignity gives rise to collective human rights. In constructing this consensus, we have succeeded in establishing a practical non-religious foundation upon which the idea of human rights can rest.

In Defense of Human Rightswill be of interest to students and scholars of political theory, philosophy, religious studies and human rights.

1. Prologue: Starvin for Justice  2. Introduction: The First Day of Class  3. Michael Perry and the Religious Cosmology: Foundations and Critiques of Human Rights  4. The Possibility of Non-religious Human Rights: Alan Gewirth and the Principle of Generic Consistency  5. The Problem of Secular Sacredness: Ronald Dworkin, Michael Perry, and Human Rights Foundationalism  6. Human Dignity Without Teleology: Human Rights and Evolutionary Biology  7. Does Might Make Human Rights?: Sympathy, Solidarity, and Subjectivity in Richard Rortys Final Vocabulary  8. Rights and Wrongs Without God: A Non-religious Grounding for Human Rights in a Pluralistic World  9. Bibliography

The justification to others of what we take to be the foundation of the human-rights ideas eventually reaches an impasse beyond which no argument can take us. Here, the debate ilÓP