Jacques Maritain, in UNESCO (ed.), Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations,
Allan Wingate, 1949 (pp. 72-77).
On the Philosophy of Human Rights
The effects of the historic evolution of humanity and of the ever more
universal crises of the modern world, coupled with the advance - be it never
so precarious - of moral consciousness and reflection, have resulted in men
apprehending today more clearly than heretofore, though still very imperfectly,
a certain number of practical truths about their life together, on which they can
reach agreement, but which, in the thought of the different groups, derive,
according to types of mind, philosophic and religious traditions, areas of
civilization and historical experience, from widely different, and even
absolutely opposed, theoretical concepts. Though it would probably not be
easy, it would be possible to arrive at a joint statement of these practical
conclusions, or in other words, of the various rights recognized as pertaining
to the human being as an individual and a social animal. But it would be quite
useless to seek for a common rational justification of those practical
conclusions and rights. That way lies the danger either of seeking to impose
an arbitrary dogmatism, or of finding the way barred at once by irreconcilable
divisions. While it seems eminently desirable to formulate a universal
Declaration of Human Rights which might be, as it were, the preface to a
moral Charter of the civilised world, it appears obvious that, for the purposes
of that Declaration, practical agreement is possible, but theoretical agreement
impossible, between mind and mind.
Now that these basic truths have been made clear, I have less
hesitation in saying that as a philosopher I am concerned with the principles
as much as, and more than, with the conclusions, and with the rational
justification of human Bights as much as, and more than, with a more or less
effective practical agreement thereon. In embarking on the question of that
rational justification, I am fully aware that, viewing things from a certain
philosophic stand-point, which is for me the true one, I cannot hope for the
agreement of those who hold to other philosophic principles.
I disagree with the view that the eighteenth century's concept of human
rights was an extension to the individual of the idea of the Divine right of kings
or of the indefeasible rights which God granted to the Church. I should be
more inclined to say that that concept ultimately traces its ancestry from the
long history of the idea of natural law and of the law of nations evolved by the
ancient world and the Middle Ages, and more immediately springs from the
one-sided distortion and rationalistic petrifaction which those ideas, to their
great despite, have undergone since the tame of Grotius and the birth of a
mechanistic ratiocination. Thus there arose the fatal misconception of natural
law - which is interior to the creature and precedes any explicit expression as a written code to be proclaimed to all, whereof every just law would be a
copy and which would decide a priori every detail of the noms of human
conduct on lines claiming to be dictated by Nature and Reason, but in fact
arbitrary and artificial. Moreover, the end of the matter was that the individual
was deified and all the rights to which he was deemed entitled were looked on
as the absolute and unlimited rights of a god.
To my mind, any attempt at rational justification of the idea of human
rights, as of the idea of right in general, requires that we rediscover in its true
metaphysical connotations, in its realistic dynamism and in its humble
dependence on nature and experience, that concept of the natural law which
was defaced by the rationalism of the eighteenth century. We then understand
how an ideal order, with its roots in the nature of man and of human society,
can impose moral requirements universally valid in the world of experience, of
history and of facts, and can lay down, alike for the conscience and for the
written law, the permanent principle and the primal and universal norms of
right and duty.
Simultaneously we understand how the natural law calls for
completion, according to the needs of tine and circumstance, by the
contingent dispositions of human law; how the human group’s awareness of
the obligations and rights implicit in the natural law itself evolves slowly and
painfully in step with the evolution of the group, and despite all errors and
confusions yet definitely advances throughout history along a path of
enrichment and revelation which has no end. Here we see the immense
influence of economic and social conditioning and, in particular, the
importance for the men of today of the new viewpoints and new problems,
transcending liberal or bourgeois individualism and touching the social values
of human life, which are being brought to birth by the crises and catastrophes
of the capitalist economy and the emergence into history of the proletariat.
No declaration of human rights will ever be exhaustive and final. It will
ever go hand-in-hand with the state of moral consciousness and civilization at
a given moment in history. And it is for that reason that even after the major
victory achieved at the end of the eighteenth century by the first written
statement of those rights, it remains thereafter a principal interest of humanity
that such declarations should be renewed from century to century.
Lastly, a reasonable concept of natural law allows us to understand the
intrinsic differences distinguishing natural law as such, the law of rations, and
positive legislation. We then see that any declaration of human rights
necessarily involves a concatenation of rights differing in degree, of which
some meet an absolute requirement of the natural law, such as the right to
existence or the right to profess, without interference by the State, the religion
one believes true (liberty of conscience), others responding to a need of the
law of nations, based on natural law, but modified in application by human law
and the requirements of ‘common use’ or the cannon good, such as the right
to own properly or the right to work, others again meeting an aspiration or
desire of the natural law confirmed by positive law, but with the limitations
required by the common good, such as the liberty of the press or sore
generally liberty of expression, freedom of exposition, and freedom of
association. These last types of liberty cannot be erected into absolute rights,
but constitute rights (conditioned by the common good) which any society
which has attained a condition of political justice is required to recognize. It is
modern liberalism’s misfortune to have made that distinction impossible for
itself, and thus to have been obliged either to contradict itself or to have
recourse to hypocrisy, in order to limit the practical exercise of rights which it
has confused with the fundamental natural rights and which theoretically it
proclaimed as absolute and sacrosanct.
The concept of natural law has been so much abused, so much pulled
about, distorted, or hypertrophied that it is hardly surprising if, in our age,
many minds declare themselves weary of the whole idea. Yet they must admit
that since Hippias and Alcidamas, the history of human rights and the history
of the natural law are one, and that the discredit into which positivism for a
period brought the concept of natural law inevitably involved similar discredit
for the concept of human rights.
Certainly, as Mr Laserson wrote recently: ‘The doctrines of natural law
must not be confused with natural law itself. The doctrines of natural law, like
any other political and legal doctrines, may propound various arguments or
theories in order to substantiate or justify natural law, but the overthrow of
these1 theories cannot signify the overthrow of natural law itself, just as the
overthrow of some theory or philosophy of law does not lead to the overthrow
of law itself. The victory of juridical positivism in the nineteenth Century over
the doctrine of natural law did not signify the death of natural law itself, hut
only the victory of the conservative historical school over the revolutionary
rationalistic school, called for "by the general historical conditions in the first
part of the 19th Century, The best proof of this is the fact that at the end of
that century the so-called “renaissance of natural law” was proclaimed.’
It remains true that a positivist philosophy based on observed facts
alone, or an idealistic or materialistic philosophy of absolute Immanence is
powerless to establish the existence of rights inhering by nature in the human
being, antecedent and superior to written laws and agreements between
governments, which the civil community is required, not to grant, but to
recognize and enforce as universally valid, and whose abolition or
infringement no consideration of social utility can even for a moment
authorise. Such a concept cannot logically seen other than a superstition to
these philosophies. It is valid and rationally defensible only if the rule of nature
as an aggregate of facts and events includes and invents a rule of nature in
the form of Being transcending facts and events, and itself based on an
Absolute greater than this world. If there be no God, the only reasonable
policy is that ‘the end justifies the means'; and, to create a society where man
shall finally enjoy his full rights, it is today permissible to violate any right of
any man if this be necessary for the purpose in hand. It is an irony stained
with blood to think that, for the revolutionary proletariat, the atheist ideology is
a heritage from the most ‘bourgeois’ representatives of the bourgeoisie, who,
after calling on the God of the Deists that they might base their own demands
on the natural law, rejected that God and the God of the Christians alike when
they were cone to power and sought to free the all-embracing exercise of
proprietary rights from the shackles of the natural law, and to close their ears
to the cry of the poor.
1
Cf Heinrich A. Rommen, Die Ewige Wiederkehr des Naturrechts (Leipzig,
Hegner, 1936); Eng. transl. The Natural Law, Herder, St. Louis, 1947.
I think that two further general remarks are necessary. Firstly the family
group is, under the natural law, anterior to the civil society and to the State. It
would thus be important in a Declaration of rights to indicate precisely the
rights and liberties deriving under this head and which human law does no
more than acknowledge.
Secondly, if it be true that the foundations of human rights lie in the
natural law, which is at once the basis of duties and of rights - these two
concepts being correlative - it becomes apparent that a declaration of rights
should normally be rounded off by a declaration of man’s obligations and
responsibilities towards the communities of which he is a part, notably the
family group, the civil society and the international community.
In particular, it would be important to bring into the light the obligations
incumbent on the conscience of the members of a society of free men, and
the right of that society to take suitable steps - through accepted institutions
for the guarantee of justice and rights - to protect liberty against those who
seek to use it in order to destroy it. The question was put in a form which we
shall long remember by the activities of those who, before the second World
War, became the propaganda tools of racialist and fascist perversion, to
disrupt the democracies from within and to arouse among men the blind
desire to deliver themselves from liberty itself.
On the enumeration and formulation of rights which logically follows, I
take the liberty of referring the reader, for a fuller exposition of my ideas than I
can give here, to the outline in my small book on Les Droits de l'Homme et la
Loi Naturelle (Paris, Paul Hartmann), where I tried in particular to show the
need of complementing the declarations of the eighteenth century by a
statement of the rights of man, not only as a human and a civic personality,
but also as a social personality (a part of the process of production and
consumption), and especially of his rights as a worker.
I would point out, too, that many valuable suggestions and lines of
thought may be found in Georges Gurvitch's essay, The Declaration of Social
Rights (New York, Ed. de la Maison française, 1944).
Finally, on the special question of freedom of the press and of the
means for the dissemination of thought, it seems to me impossible to deal
with this fully without reference to the work of the Committee on the Freedom
of the Press, which in the United States has during the last few years
investigated exhaustively all aspects of the problem and of which I had the
honour to be one of the foreign members.