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Human Rights and Human Nature

  • Book
  • © 2014

Overview

  • First volume to provide a comprehensive overview of naturalistic accounts on human rights
  • Addresses the role that human nature plays in the foundation of human rights
  • Provides clear insights as to how transformations of the human affect the idea of human rights
  • Highlights how human rights theory is being informed by current legal, ethical and medical issues
  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Part of the book series: Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice (IUSGENT, volume 35)

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Table of contents (16 chapters)

  1. The Role of Nature in Human Rights Discourse – Foundations and Limitations

Keywords

About this book

This book explores both the possibilities and limits of arguments from human nature in the context of human rights. Can the concept of human nature provide a basis for understanding fundamental rights? Is it plausible to justify the claim to universal validity of human rights by reference to human nature? Or does the idea of human rights in its modern, post-1945 manifestation go, in essence, beyond human nature? The essays in this volume introduce naturalistic positions and their concomitant critiques. They address the role that human nature both actually does and potentially may play in forming a foundation for and acting as an exemplification of fundamental rights. Beyond that, they give attention to the challenges caused by Life Sciences. Human nature itself is subject to transformation and transgression in an unprecedented manner. The essays reflect on issues such as reproduction, species manipulation, corporeal autonomy and enhancement. Contributors are jurists, philosophers and political scientists from Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, Poland and Japan.

Editors and Affiliations

  • Faculty of Law, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Marion Albers, Jörn Reinhardt

  • Philosophy Department, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany

    Thomas Hoffmann

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