The Manifold Foundations of Human Rights

The struggle for human rights, while beginning as a moral problem about our common responsibilities, can only be taken seriously when we consider its political ramifications. The crucial problem running through the essays in Telos 203 is the difficulty of establishing a unified foundation for human rights given the variety of cultural, legal, moral, and political perspectives that we find in the world regarding the question of how we relate to each other as humans. Three key themes dominate the discussions: the difficulty of balancing the commitment to the universality of human rights with a respect for cultural diversity, the centrality of individual conscience rather than legal determinations in the development of the habits and conventions of human rights, and the inevitably political nature of the human rights project.

Introduction
David Pan

The Commission on Unalienable Rights: Where Do We Go from Here?
Mary Ann Glendon

Dignity and Human Rights: Aspirations and Challenges in an Age of Political Divisions, Distrust, and AI
Martha Minow

Natural Law and Unalienable Rights
Nigel Biggar

Human Rights Practice and Natural Law
Aaron Rhodes

Islam and the Promotion of Human Rights
Sherman A. Jackson

“Three Rights Traditions Walk into a Bar in Jakarta”: Inalienable Human Rights from the Perspective of Different Civilizations
Timothy Samuel Shah and C. Holland Taylor

Human Rights and Nation-State Sovereignty
David Pan

Horizontality vs. Verticality: New Readings in the Understanding of Religion and the Organizing of Politics
Aryeh Botwinick

Xi Jinping’s Political Model and the Typology of Communist Regimes: An Ideological Approach
Alexander Lukin

Critical Theory of the Contemporary

Welcome to the Machine: AI, Existential Risk, and the Iron Cage of Modernity
Jay A. Gupta

Reviews

Toward a Theopolitical of the “International”
Spiros Makris

Remembrance

In Memoriam: Fred Siegel
David Pan