caa a22 4500 388113308 CHVBK 20180307125359.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130s1999 xx s 000 0 eng 10.2307/1051779 doi S0748081400004409 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.2307/1051779 Porter Jean From Natural Law to Human Rights: Or, Why Rights Talk Matters [Elektronische Daten] [Jean Porter] Near the beginning of The Idea of Human Rights, Michael Perry states that "One of my principal goals ... is to clarify and address the unusually murky subject of ‘moral relativism'—and to do so from the perspective of what can properly be called ‘natural law.”” This he defines, following D.J. O'Connor, as a view according to which "basic principles of morals and legislation are, in some sense or other, objective, accessible to reason and based on human nature.” Subsequently, he explains that the relation between belief in natural law and in human rights is one of presupposition; that is to say, a doctrine of natural rights presupposes the moral realism which in his view is the central core of natural law theories. As his discussion makes clear, Perry's claim that human rights presuppose a natural law should be understood as a theoretical claim. At the same time, it raises interesting historical issues. That is, when we examine classical accounts of the natural law, are these explicitly linked with doctrines of natural or human rights, or something recognizably similar? (Throughout this paper, I treat the terms "human” and "natural” rights as synonyms.) And more generally, what can we learn from the ways in which our forbears drew connections, or failed to do so, between a natural law and human rights? Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 1999 Journal of Law and Religion Cambridge University Press 14/1(1999), 77-96 0748-0814 14:1<77 1999 14 JLR https://doi.org/10.2307/1051779 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.2307/1051779 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Porter Jean NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Journal of Law and Religion Cambridge University Press 14/1(1999), 77-96 0748-0814 14:1<77 1999 14 JLR CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge