Abstract
If we accept the premise that human rights are moral rights, then human rights issues fall within the general domain of the relationship of morality and foreign policy. Hence they tend to suffer from the same doubts and perplexities which mark the wider domain. Morality and foreign policy are notoriously on bad terms with each other, at least if the realists are to be believed. Although moral scepticism has lately been undermined by more sophisticated analyses of the relationship between morality and foreign policy, there remains the problem of identifying and characterising a realm of moral values which transcends and encompasses the diverse spheres of individual and communal morality which exist throughout the world.
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Notes
K. Baier, ‘When Does the Right to Life Begin?’, in J. R. Pennock and J. W. Chapman (eds) Human Rights (NOMOS XXIII) (New York and London: New York University Press, 1981) p. 210.
J. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980) p. 153.
J. Glenn Gray, On Understanding Violence Philosophically (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) pp. 5–9.
K. Knott, The Good Want Power (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977) p. 298.
M. Cranston, ‘What are Human Rights?’, Dialogue, no. 66, 4(1984) p. 58.
J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
A. J. M. Milne, ‘Human Rights and the Diversity of Morals: A Philosophical Analysis of Rights and Obligations in the Global System’, in M. Wright (ed.), Rights and Obligations in North—South Relations: Ethical Dimensions of Global Problems (London: Macmillan, 1986).
See A. I. Melden, Rights and Persons (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977) esp. ch. 6.
Ibid, pp. 175–6.
R. Scruton, ‘Viewpoint’ column, Times Literary Supplement, 14 March 1980, p. 291.
For an overview see P. Sieghart, The International Law of Human Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) and The Lawful Rights of Mankind: An Introduction to the International Legal Code of Human Rights (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
I am indebted to H. Morris’s essay ‘Persons and Punishment’ in his On Guilt and Innocence: Essays in Legal Philosophy and Moral Psychology (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1976).
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© 1989 Dilys M. Hill
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Wright, M. (1989). How Problematical are the Moral Foundations of Human Rights?. In: Hill, D.M. (eds) Human Rights and Foreign Policy. Southampton Studies in International Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09334-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09334-2_3
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