caa a22 4500 388113251 CHVBK 20180307125359.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130s1999 xx s 000 0 eng 10.2307/1051777 doi S0748081400004380 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.2307/1051777 Elshtain Jean Bethke The Dignity of the Human Person and the Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries [Elektronische Daten] [Jean Bethke Elshtain] The heart of Michael Perry's argument lies in his claim that "every human being is sacred” and, that being the case, it follows that there are "some things that ought never (for example, under any circumstances or conditions) to be done to any human being or some things that ought always (under all conditions) to be done for every human being?” The "foundational” claim is that every human being, because sacred, is owed a certain regard and that this regard, in our time, has taken shape as, and congealed around, the idea of human rights. The dignity of the person, in other words, is a necessary prior assumption from which rights derive. The ontological claim, or to put it in a similar if not identical way, certain anthropological presuppositions, necessarily ground any sustainable human rights argument. It is possible, certainly, to make human rights claims on purely conventional grounds or, in more "Rortyesque” language, as just the way we do things around here. But that claim is not sustainable over time, argues Perry. It follows that "there is no intelligible (much less persuasive) secular version of the conviction that every human being is sacred; the only intelligible versions are religious.” Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 1999 Journal of Law and Religion Cambridge University Press 14/1(1999), 53-65 0748-0814 14:1<53 1999 14 JLR https://doi.org/10.2307/1051777 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.2307/1051777 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Elshtain Jean Bethke NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Journal of Law and Religion Cambridge University Press 14/1(1999), 53-65 0748-0814 14:1<53 1999 14 JLR CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge