Human Rights In International Relations Literature

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In the International Relations literature, one often comes across the statement that human rights are a Kantian theme. What is the meaning of this assertion? What does it refer to? And in which sense does the term “Kantian” fundament the notion of human rights? The post-WW2 period demonstrates the importance of the Kantian ideas to the human rights, knowing that the reorganization of the international system that followed was due to, but no only, the idea that democratic regimes sustained by human rights were more propitious for maintaining peace and international security. But it is in the post-Cold War period when the attributive use of the human rights theme as a Kantian theme in IR gains substance. With the end of the conflicts between…show more content…
This is the objective of this paper: to go back to the previous, essential points of the Kantian logics for the purpose of laying out the affirmation that the human rights are a Kantian theme in IR. The intention is to demonstrate, as the text progresses, what the consequences of this attribution actually are. The first indispensable issue to understand this question is the distinction between Law and Moral in Kant, once distinguishing and simultaneously submitting Law to Moral, Kant establishes a complex theoretical arrangement which characterizes human rights as moral rights. Other important point is the question of the categorical imperative. Elaborating a way to verify the morality and the universalization of an action, Kant provides the human rights with a base, having in sight that, submitting an action to such formula one guarantees the condition of autonomy, which builds to the principle of human dignity, fulcrum of the idea of the human…show more content…
It is analysing this conception aside the one of Morals (not necessarily antagonised to Law, as some critics point out, especially in the Realist school) that it becomes possible to arrive to the logical arrangement of the human rights as moral rights. For such, it becomes necessary to recur to the analysis of Kant’s arguments in “Doctrine of Law”, from 17979. Kant begins establishing a differentiating positive and negative freedom. The first, according to the author, refers to the condition of acting over oneself, translated in the condition of autonomy. The second attains itself to the sphere of no harm and no violence towards the individual. The methodology for the exercise of this freedom follows the idea that every action’s maxim should also serve as general law. Both dimensions of such condition are considered by the philosopher as the moral laws of freedom. The term “morals” is employed I this expression also with the purpose of distinguishing such laws from the laws of the natural sphere. If these laws regard solely external actions, they are legal laws. demand that the laws themselves are the action’s determining principles, then they are called ethical

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