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Human Rights as Social Construction

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Notes

  1. I have criticized Perry’s claim elsewhere. See http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007/08/religion-and-human-rights.html; http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007/08/partly-necessary-god.html.

  2. The kind of argument Gregg offers has already been made familiar by Richard Rorty. See Rorty (1989). Gregg’s account of the cultural basis of human rights, however, is much more thoroughly articulated than Rorty’s.

  3. See Bayer (1987, pp. 183–186).

  4. At one point he acknowledges this: ‘Human nature biologically understood guarantees nothing in a political way or otherwise in a value-driven sense’ (p. 114). But he still regards biology as somehow relevant to his project.

  5. See Dworkin (2013).

References

  • Bayer, R. (1987) Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis, revised edn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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  • Dworkin, R. (2013) Religion without God. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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  • Glendon, M.A. (2001) A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New York: Random House.

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  • Perry, M. (2007) Toward a Theory of Human Rights: Religion, Law, Courts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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  • Rawls, J. (2005) Political Liberalism, expanded edn. New York: Columbia University Press.

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  • Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Koppelman, A., Gregg, B. Human Rights as Social Construction . Contemp Polit Theory 13, 380–386 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2014.10

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