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Declaration Of Rights Essay

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The three primary dissenters to the human rights tradition as put forth by the likes of John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine and Immanuel Kant all based their criticisms of the tradition in some way on questioning the foundations of the claims for human rights. All of the three – Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham and Karl Marx – land on a conclusion that the human rights tradition has too heavy a dependence upon individuals, whether through an overdependence on their ability to reason in the case of Burke or through an overdependence on protecting and benefitting individuals in the cases of Bentham and Marx.
WITH REGARDS TO BURKE
Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, presents a criticism of natural rights dependent upon …show more content…

Rather than striving to criticize the basis (or lack thereof) for natural rights, as Burke does, Bentham writes against natural rights by criticizing their written formalisms and the implications that need follow them. Specifically, Bentham goes through the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and attacks the aspects of some passages with which he takes issue. While the technique of reading the French Declaration completely literally and ignoring the potential of any aspirational aspects of the human rights tradition borders on fallacy in its own right, Bentham’s specific criticisms do ask questions that the thinkers both before and after him struggled to answer – chiefly with regards to the epistemic basis for human rights. For instance, Bentham criticizes the language of Article 1 by declaring absurd the notions of universal freedom and equality in rights at birth (121). Further, and more consequentially, he attacks the idea from Article 2 that the government should exist solely to protect these individual natural rights (122), a logical step considering that Bentham disputes the existence of these natural rights at all. Furthermore, he views the attempted application of human rights ideals as dangerous to society and security, for the unsubstantiated claims of members of the human rights tradition give some form of legitimacy to those who would seek to supplant established government

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