Brief Conclusion on the Foundation of Human Rights
As shall be noted in the following chapter, in the Islamic scheme of things, the foundation and ultimate source of “human rights” is the commandments from God. Obviously, different groups have very different perceptions of God. Hence, in their desire to make something “universal,” the human rights theorists are forced to find some foundation other than God upon which to lay their new humanistic/secular view of the world. In all honesty, though, it seems that they have met with no success whatsoever. By removing God, they were not able to come up with any convincing upon which to base human rights for all.

The following passage from Stackhouse does a good job of demonstrating the quagmire and confusion surrounding the foundation for human rights.


Stackhouse wrote,
Ironically, one of the leading international advocacy organizations for human rights, Amnesty International, has sponsored lectures by outstanding political philosophers that reveal the fragility of contemporary secular thinking about universalistic principles. In their defenses of human rights, they provide thin, mutually contradictory, and often precisely Hobbesian or Nietzschean, grounds for doing so. 

For the most part, they say, human rights emerge under sociological conditions of modernity as an assertion of the will of sovereigns. They offer no explanation as to when, where, or why these social conditions arose, or when, where, or why this will was exercised. Some, to be sure, turn to the nature of human imagination, with its presumptions of linguistic construction, to see what the character of language and discourse itself tells us. And while they note that it has a grammar, it is not clear that one can get from grammar to human rights, for the opponents of human rights also have a grammar.

Their arguments read thin precisely because they share a disregard of, sometimes a contempt for, theology as a possible resource in the interpretation of, or the guidance of, the common life. The dependence on sociological or linguistic analysis alone (although sometimes a blend of the two) as the bases for ethical and jurisprudential values suggests that, in substantial measure, political philosophy as practiced today is groundless and more culturally and contextually variable than theology. These philosophers tend to share the Enlightenment view that theology is the more or less rationalized articulation of otherwise quite irrational religious dogmas. This questionable view is suspect on empirical and rational grounds, and remains quite unaware of the traditions of “public theology” in relation to human rights.

This author cannot emphasize enough the weight of this question of the foundation of human rights in the light of what human rights proponents are demanding of Muslims and the “changes” they are supposed to make in their religion. Secularly minded people, such as many human rights activists are, may not be able to perceive exactly what is going on when they make strong demands upon Muslims with very little or nothing to back up their premises. The reality, though, is that not everyone in the world in the world is secular minded and definitely not every Muslim is secular minded.


What should be considered a human right?
Once it is realized that the foundations for human rights in the first place are not solid, the question of what can be considered a human right becomes even more so an astonishing question. If one cannot determine the foundation of something—the basis on which the thought is constructed—how can then one conclude what forms part of the locus of that thought? Upon what parameters can someone possibly claim that X or Y should be a human right when the initial parameters themselves cannot be established?


Orend stated,
The devil, though, is in the details: even if we all endorse some understanding of “human rights,” it still seems to matter importantly whether we all endorse the same understanding of that to which “human rights” refers. In other words, Walzer may make a compelling argument that commitment to the ideal of human rights is universally shared, or very nearly so. But an equally important question is whether there is near-universal agreement on the practical side of the commitment, namely, to provide the same set of objects to everyone.

Who can say what should be considered a human right? In other words, on what basis are human rights to be determined?


On what basis are the following topical questions to be answered:
(a)    Should homosexuals have the same sexual/marriage/family rights as heterosexuals?

(b)    Should pornography be considered repugnant to human dignity or a free expression of art that is protected by the concept of human rights?

(c)    Should there be no laws distinguishing men and women in any way, as is claimed by gender feminists?

(d)    Should one have the right to blaspheme religion and God as a form of freedom of expression?

(e)    Should a pregnant woman or anyone else have the right to have a fetus aborted in the first, second or third trimester?

(f)    Is the death penalty considered a violation of human rights?

(g)    Is male circumcision-not simply female genital mutilation-a violation of human rights ?

These questions actually lie at the crux of the human rights debates today—and the questions are going to become more and more complex and perplexing as biomedical sciences continue to progress.  Again, these all go back to the question of the foundation of human rights, which would answer questions like what is a human right and who has the right do determine what a human right is. Amazingly though, there are no satisfactory answers for these questions.

In any case, upon reading human rights theorists one quickly recognizes how subjective the list of human rights can be. Note, for example, the discussion concerning homosexuality from Donnelly. At one point he admits, “[H]omosexuality is widely considered-by significant segments of society in all countries, and by most people in most countries-to be profoundly immoral. The language of perversion and degeneracy is standard.”  The first point that one can note is that even after admitting this fact that most of the world’s population is not willing to accept this practice, he continues by arguing that homosexuality is still a human right that people cannot trample upon.  He goes on from that point to attempt to argue while no matter how repugnant their act may seem, it still must be considered a human right.

This is what he had to say,
Even accepting, for the purposes of argument, that voluntary sexual relations among adults of the same sex are a profound moral outrage, discrimination against sexual minorities cannot be justified from a human rights perspective. “Perverts,” “degenerates,” and “deviants”-‘ have the same human rights as the morally pure and should have those rights guaranteed by law. Members of sexual minorities are still human beings, no matter how deeply they are loathed by the rest of society. They are therefore entitled to equal protection of the law and the equal enjoyment of all internationally recognized human rights.   

Human rights rest on the idea that all human beings have certain basic rights simply because they are human. How one chooses to lead one’s life,subject only to minimum requirements of law and public order, is a private matter—no matter how publicly one leads that life. Human rights do not need to be earned, and they cannot be lost because one’s beliefs or way of life are repugnant to most others in a society.


Interestingly, though, earlier in the same work Donnelly stated,
To require identical treatment of all individual or group differences-consider, for example, pedophiles, violent racists, those who derive pleasure from kidnapping and torturing strangers, and religious missionaries committed to killing those they cannot convert-would be perverse.

There are legal lobbies pushing for the acceptance of such practices in the US. In fact, recently a Catholic Priest named Shanley was found to be advocating such an organization. Is Donnelly not willing to accept pedophiles simply because they have not yet-emphasis on yet-been accepted by Western culture? If and when their organizations are accepted by law in the United States and the majority of the world’s population still finds that practice repugnant, will pedophilia then be a human right according to Donnelly and people like him? In any case, it is clear from Donnelly, a leading theorist on human rights, that the entire question of what is a human right is simply subjective.

If Donnelly would remain firm on not accepting pedophiles, the next generation of human rights writers may well be promoting pedophilia as the frontier of human rights demands upon the world. Perhaps Donnelly does not acquiesce to pedophiles because he believes that there must be some moral limits somewhere. But, alas, the human rights paradigm certainly does not provide moral limits of that nature.