Human Rights

Development of the Concept

Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism have all produced writings suggesting that divine order imposes certain duties on believers in their treatment of other people. Many human rights scholars, however, find the origin of the concept in Greek stoicism, particularly the work of Epictectus, who held that a divine force pervades all creation and that human conduct should therefore be judged by the extent to which it was in harmony with this force. From this it was a short step to the idea of a “law of nature” or “natural law,” which is a system of justice derived from nature that transcends the laws of any one nation and that applies to all human beings. Through the Middle Ages, the concept of natural law informed the thinking of political and religious writers who tried to discover its essence so that secular law could be crafted in a way that reflected this natural law. The resulting secular laws often concerned the duties of various socially unequal parties toward each other (e.g., ruler and subject, lord and peasant); they also accepted the institutions of serfdom and slavery. Nevertheless, laws that set limits to governmental exercise of power over the governed set valuable precedents. The most famous example is England's Magna Carta (1215) which, among other things, forced King John to acknowledge the right of every freeman to own property, to leave and return to the kingdom, and not to be “arrested or detained in prison, or deprived of his freehold, or outlawed, or banished, or in any way molested … unless by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land.” The “liberties, rights, and concessions” listed in the Magna Carta were considered fundamental enough to be cited by other and later documents declaring human rights, such as England's Petition of Right (1628) and the Habeas Corpus Act (1679), as well as the national and several state constitutions of the United States.

It was during the Renaissance that the gradual decline of feudalism and the surge of new ideas provided the context for a concept of human rights that rested on the notions of equality and liberty. Humanism, with its central emphasis on the individual, supported the shift from natural law as specifying duties to natural law as identifying rights. It encouraged a view of each person as being created with certain “inalienable” rights that were not diminished by membership in a particular class or group and that could not be weakened by the power of a ruler. This view was put to the test by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century discoveries of people who differed greatly from Europeans in their appearance, living conditions, and religion. The desire to exploit or convert these peoples made it tempting to define them as less than human and therefore not endowed with the rights of humans. A vocal minority, however, courageously asserted the universality of the human ability to reason and therefore to be possessed of the right to freedom and equality. Foremost among these was Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Spanish Dominican missionary in the Americas. In his In Defense of the Indians (c. 1548), he called upon the emperor Charles V to recognize that God had endowed the inhabitants of the New World with “the natural light that is common to all peoples” and therefore to protect them against the depredations of the conquering Spanish soldiers and priests.

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