Grounding Human Rights in Human Nature

Book excerpt: What does it mean that human rights derive from human dignity? And what is the foundation of human dignity? How are human dignity and its foundation connected? Is the recent development of natural sciences dealing with human nature, like evolutionary psychology, relevant to these questions? The book addresses these points by connecting the discussion on the foundations of human rights with the recent claims regarding human nature made in evolutionary psychology, and with contemporary analytic metaphysics, especially the relation of metaphysical grounding. It offers in-depth insights into the so-called naturalistic approach to human rights, together with detailed proposals on how the approach could be truly naturalized in the philosophical sense. It shows how human rights and human dignity may have foundations in natural facts about human nature and offers a detailed analysis of how the “is” / “ought” gap problematic can be solved.The book also addresses the objection of Western ethnocentrism – unlike most of the contemporary philosophical accounts of human rights, which draw on highly individualistic Western concepts, it employs concepts like altruism and cooperation.