Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights: A History

This paper explains how Lynn Hunt articulates human rights. It explores whether human rights existed in non-European societies as Lynn Hunt articulates them. The paper also explains how the American society (U.S.) and African societies in general conceived of human rights during the 1500s to1800s.

Human rights are privileges innate to all human beings their statuses notwithstanding. Every person is endowed with entitlement to these freedoms purely on grounds of being human. Each person is entitled to human rights without of bias. These rights are all interconnected, co-dependent and inseparable.

Lynn Hunt traces back human rights and its discussions to Rousseau in the 18th century. Hunt dates human rights from the establishment of individual liberty towards the end of 18th century. Individuals started viewing themselves as autonomous persons therefore with rights. She outlines a number of factors that must be in place for "human rights" to be such and be part of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. These rights must universal i.e. valid in all places, equal i.e. identical for everybody, and undeniable or natural i.e. innate in humans. It is necessary that humans express particular qualities for the above to be put in play. These qualities include: the individual must, be morally independent, have a sense of empathy, be capable of thinking for one's self independently, and have an extensively collective idea of "interior feeling." These factors are incorporated to idealize the notion of human rights. For rights to obtain the natural state, individuals must be free from external forces intrusion. Human rights according to Hunt is a branch of independence and one's ability to make decisions autonomously. If individuals are guided by the state or a church, then one is not strictly autonomous. Natural rights are born from natural law, i.e. the idea of an existing natural moral system based on the recognition of certain basic and objectively confirmable human good. Natural rights are held autonomously from organizations and the state. To be autonomous, a person must be able to think for themselves. They must be independent, self-governing and self-sustaining. Lynn postulates that in order to have human rights, one had to be viewed as an independent individual able to exercise independent moral decision. Moral autonomy is intertwined with universality in that it is grounded on moral universalism which means that to be morally universal, people must agree on what right and wrong is. Lynn argues that, people are most convinced that a human right is at question when they are dismayed by its infringement. Undoubtedly, when humans have the ability to have a feeling of horror enlarge in them, they are turning out to be empathetic to others. Empathy is depends upon the recognition that people feel and think as ones' self does.

In some non-European societies, human rights did not exist