The ‘Iura Connata’ in the Natural Law of Christian Wolff

Author(s):  
Frank Grunert

Whether Christian Wolff’s concept of innate rights is a substantial contribution to the development of the concept of human rights or not has been a major concern of recent literature. This chapter explores the role of Christian Wolff’s conception of iura connata or innate rights as possible foundations for the modern doctrine of human rights, imbuing natural law with a degree of transhistoricality and engaging with Knud Haakonssen’s rather different treatment of Wolff’s natural rights as alienable.

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 613
Author(s):  
Christopher Tollefsen

Critics of the “New” Natural Law (NNL) theory have raised questions about the role of the divine in that theory. This paper considers that role in regard to its account of human rights: can the NNL account of human rights be sustained without a more or less explicit advertence to “the question of God’s existence or nature or will”? It might seem that Finnis’s “elaborate sketch” includes a full theory of human rights even prior to the introduction of his reflections on the divine in the concluding chapter of Natural Law and Natural Rights. But in this essay, I argue that an adequate account of human rights cannot, in fact, be sustained without some role for God’s creative activity in two dimensions, the ontological and the motivational. These dimensions must be distinguished from the epistemological dimension of human rights, that is, the question of whether epistemological access to truths about human rights is possible without reference to God’s existence, nature, or will. The NNL view is that such access is possible. However, I will argue, the epistemological cannot be entirely cabined off from the relevant ontological and motivational issues and the NNL framework can accommodate this fact without difficulty.


Kant Yearbook ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-71
Author(s):  
Mike L. Gregory

Abstract Kant’s Naturrecht Feyerabend has recently gained more sustained attention for its role in clarifying Kant’s published positions in political philosophy. However, too little attention has been given to the lecture’s relation to Gottfried Achenwall, whose book was the textbook for the course. In this paper, I will examine how Kant rejected and transforms Achenwall’s natural law system in the Feyerabend Lectures. Specifically, I will argue that Kant problematizes Achenwall’s foundational notion of a divine juridical state which opens up a normative gap between objective law (prohibitions, prescriptions and permissions) and subjective rights (moral capacities). In the absence of a divine sovereign, formal natural law is unable to justify subjective natural rights in the state of nature. In the Feyerabend Lectures, Kant, in order to close this gap, replaces the divine will with the “will of society”, making the state necessary for the possibility of rights.


Author(s):  
Kenneth Pennington

One of the most notable characteristics of Western societies has been the development of individual and group rights in legal, theological, and philosophical thought of the first two millennia. It has often been noted that thinkers in Non-Western societies have not had the same preoccupation with rights. The very concept of rights is laden with numerous problems. Universality is the most basic and difficult. If human rights are only a product of Western ideas of justice, they cannot have universality. In an age that is dominated by conceptions of law embracing some form of legal positivism, many scholars recognize only individual rights that have been established by the constitutional jurisprudence of individual countries or their legal systems. Historically, the emergence of rights in European jurisprudence is intimately connected with the terms ius naturale and lex naturalis in Western jurisprudence and theological thought. Human beings may never agree on universal rules of a natural law, but they might agree on universal precepts that shape the penumbra of rights surrounding natural rights.


Reified Life ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 148-174
Author(s):  
J. Paul Narkunas

This chapter describes how English and French as the de jure languages of human rights at the International Criminal Court. As a result, populations who do not adhere to Western Enlightenment notions of rights can be declared terrorists or “enemies of humankind.” By tracing the workings of translation in the ICC through the Thomas Lubanga trial, the author discusses how translation can deny human status to those brought before the ICC. It also provides, however, the means to challenge the legitimacy of the court as merely another sign of universalizing western justice, solidified by the fact that all people brought before the ICC come from the continent of Africa. By focusing on how language produces reality, the creation of natural rights claims allow for new forms of political protection in the chasm between differing legal orders. Consequently, thinking the role of translation as metaphor and practice for world making and the production of agency is an inchoate form of political aesthetics. Translation may offer, thus, a way to reconceive the human and its attendant rights due to language’s role in world making, subject production, and power relations. This indicates a form of ahuman agency.


Significance Pompeo launched the commission on July 8, charging it with providing “fresh thinking” on human rights where concepts of rights have “departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights”. However, the body’s precise activities are left vague. The commission is also widely interpreted as an effort to infuse the current framework for human rights in US foreign policy with more conservative social values. Impacts The commission could be a flashpoint in budget negotiations down to September/October and beyond. The body will likely reinterpret rights more conservatively, including on abortion and LGBT issues, and elevate religious liberty. The pro-Israel lobby will welcome the commission, partly as the UN has been criticised as being ‘anti-Israel’.


Author(s):  
O. M. Sheredʹko

Prominent international law scholar H. Lauterpacht devoted most of his exploratory work to the issue of human rights in international law.This article reveals H. Lauterpacht’s views on the role of international law in the recognition and consolidation of human rights and the role of jusnaturalism as the basis of international human rights law. Analyzing the works by H. Lauterpacht, we can say that the scholar was the founder of international human rights law. Natural law and natural human rights, according to H. Lauterpacht, have been the unchanging basis of human rights of all times.The origins and periodization of jusnaturalism in the works of leading international law scholar are considered. The main statements of the representatives of the natural law concept of different times, in particular, the basic ideas in the works of Socrates, Aulis Aarnio, Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Suarez, Alberico Gentili, Thomas Hobbes, Samuel von Pufendorf, Hugo Grotius are outlined.The views of prominent philosophers are the foundation of the concept of jusnaturalism.  Numerous supporters of the concept of natural law in different periods of history testify to its importance at every stage of human rights development.International law in this matter is a kind of second stage of recognition and protection of human rights, after recognition in the national law of states.International law is designed to consolidate the rights granted by nature to the human in the international arena.H. Lauterpacht saw the real recognition and protection of human rights by enshrining them in an international document signed by all countries of the world.The scientist proposed a draft international document on the recognition of human rights at the international level called International Bill of the Rights of Man. The provisions proposed in this document were later enshrined in international instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966 and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966.


Author(s):  
Amelia Rose Coleman

The ways that blogs are used to improve the lot of the disenfranchised is an area that is increasingly gaining research traction. This chapter presents a literature review of the recent literature in to the ways that minority groups are using blogs to tell their story to a wide audience. It looks at the ways that human rights bloggers have used Web 2.0 platforms to express themselves. It then applies Foucault's (1988) work on self-expression to other groups who are also heavy users of blogs to express themselves in new ways. The chapter looks at poverty, at those who identify as LGBTIQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer) and women. It suggests that there is much research that still needs to be undertaken to properly examine the role of blogs in the lives of increasing numbers of groups who are not able to express themselves in mainstream media, and to explore the ways that these blogs render mainstream media irrelevant in connected times.


2018 ◽  
pp. 890-905
Author(s):  
Amelia Rose Coleman

The ways that blogs are used to improve the lot of the disenfranchised is an area that is increasingly gaining research traction. This chapter presents a literature review of the recent literature in to the ways that minority groups are using blogs to tell their story to a wide audience. It looks at the ways that human rights bloggers have used Web 2.0 platforms to express themselves. It then applies Foucault's (1988) work on self-expression to other groups who are also heavy users of blogs to express themselves in new ways. The chapter looks at poverty, at those who identify as LGBTIQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer) and women. It suggests that there is much research that still needs to be undertaken to properly examine the role of blogs in the lives of increasing numbers of groups who are not able to express themselves in mainstream media, and to explore the ways that these blogs render mainstream media irrelevant in connected times.


1971 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. O. Aihe

The rights of the individual in the society have been conceived as natural rights—which in the modern state have no more than a moral force. In the context of a modern state which asserts absolute powers within its borders, it appears idle to suggest as in the traditional natural law theories that there is anything like a law of nature existing independently of and overriding positive law.


Phainomenon ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 22-23 (1) ◽  
pp. 441-454
Author(s):  
Ana Paula Loureiro de Sousa

Abstract The justification of Natural Law is a very controversial issue, not only after the Positivist’s rebuttals, but since its very anthropological foundations in the early modern age. In this paper, I try do give an account of Natural Law and natural rights in terms of a phenomenological description of the background of normative intentionality. Taking a genetic stance, I go from the positive norm and the intentionality that constitutes it to the underling pregiveness that supplies the condition of its possibility. I exhibit it as the experience of the live-world, and I analyze it as an intersubjective world, where persons are given as equals and worth-counting. This is the very root of the concept of human dignity. Starting from it, I develop an account of the sense and content of the concept of Human Rights as a set of eidetic laws creating the framework for authentic human relationships.


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