The argument that religion provides the only compelling foundation for human rights is both challenging and thought-provoking and answering it is of fundamental importance to the furthering of the human rights agenda.

This book establishes an equally compelling non-religious foundation for the idea of human rights, engaging with the writings of many key thinkers in the field, including Michael J. Perry, Alan Gewirth, Ronald Dworkin and Richard Rorty. Ari Kohen draws on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a political consensus of overlapping ideas from cultures and communities around the world that establishes the dignity of humans and argues that this dignity gives rise to collective human rights. In constructing this consensus, we have succeeded in establishing a practical non-religious foundation upon which the idea of human rights can rest.

In Defense of Human Rights will be of interest to students and scholars of political theory, philosophy, religious studies and human rights.

• Book Cover 2
• Title 7
• Copyright 8
• Dedication 9
• Contents 11
• Acknowledgments 13
• Prologue: Starvin' for Justice 17
• Introduction: The first day of class 22
• 1 Michael Perry and the religious cosmology: Foundations and critiques of human rights 29
• 2 The possibility of non-religious human rights: Alan Gewirth and the Principle of Generic Consistency 54
• 3 The problem of secular sacredness: Ronald Dworkin, Michael Perry, and human rights foundationalism 80
• 4 Human dignity without teleology: Human rights and evolutionary biology 101
• 5 Does might make human rights?: Sympathy, solidarity, and subjectivity in Richard Rorty's final vocabulary 125
• 6 Rights and wrongs without God: A non-religious grounding for human rights in a pluralistic world 145
• Notes 168