Szymon Mazurkiewicz

The chapter begins with responds to potential critical points that either have been raised to similar approaches to mine, or could be raised against my proposal. I argue that they are not sound, for instance the objection of essentialism and foundationalism turns out to be falsified in light of the recent discoveries about scientifically understood human nature. I argue that it is my proposal that gives the best rejection to the most crucial argument against human rights and their current dominant role of philosophising—the objection of Western ethnocentrism that claims that human rights are just a Western idea. Lastly, I provide theoretical and methodological consequences of my approach, both within the philosophy of human rights and analytic metaphysics.

This chapter clarifies the meaning of terms human rights, human dignity and human nature used in the book. As for human rights, I refer to the debate whether they protect a decent or rather a flourishing level of life. I also follow the distinction on universal and particular human rights. I examine the major approaches to human dignity: classical and Christian as well as Kantian along its modern continuation. I argue that each of them has significant drawbacks in relation to further justification of human rights on the basis of human dignity. I analyse different understandings of the concept of nature and then human nature and decide to follow the view that human nature is a set of dominant tendencies in human behaviour as fitting the best scientific notion of human nature. Then, I present the discoveries of evolutionary psychology, especially the claim that human nature is constituted by the tendency to cooperate. Such a vision of human nature can be understood as optimistic or simply good from moral point of view.

I examine the major approaches in the philosophy of human rights from the point of view of their answer on the precise character of the relation between human rights and their foundations as well as from the point of view of taking into consideration the discoveries of natural sciences. It turns out that the relation between human rights and their foundations is either flawed, weak or unclear. Similarly, there are almost no references to the rapid development of natural sciences dealing with human in the major approaches to human rights.

I examine whether the supervenience relation can constitute the relation holding between human rights, human dignity and human nature. Supervenience is a relation of a necessary covariance such that there cannot be difference in a supervenient entity without difference in a subvenient entity. Therefore, I verify whether human rights (also with introducing the layer of particular and universal human rights) cannot change without change in human dignity and whether human dignity cannot change without human nature. Even though these claims are correct, which means that human rights supervene on human dignity and human dignity supervenes on human nature, supervenience as just a relation of covariance is too weak to plausibly express that human dignity is the foundation of human rights and human nature is the foundation of human dignity. It also cannot provide explanation for these claims.

This chapter presents the examination whether the relation of metaphysical grounding holds between human rights, human dignity and human nature. This relation, being vividly discussed among contemporary analytic metaphysicians relation, is a relation holding if one fact/entity exists due to another fact/entity. It is claimed to involve explanation. I argue that metaphysical grounding holds between the debated entities, and consequently, is able to give explanation as for the holding of human rights and human dignity. Thus, the relation of “derivation” mentioned in international law to hold between human rights and human dignity is the relation of metaphysical grounding. I provide also argumentation how a normative entity like human dignity can be grounded in a descriptively understood human nature.

This chapter gives insights on the philosophical background of the book. I present the contemporary philosophy project of naturalisation and the distinction on ontological and methodological naturalism. I refer to the debate on the autonomy of ethics to clearly analyse what it means that we cannot derive a normative concept or entity (like human rights or human dignity) from descriptive one (like human nature). Then, I move to the recent analytic metaphysics works on the relations in which various entities stand to each other, like the work on the relation of metaphysical grounding. Lastly, I analyse if human rights can be reduced to human dignity and if human dignity can be reduced to human nature.

In this chapter I provide the main reasons to take a new look at the foundations of human rights. The question on the foundations of human rights immediately touches the question on the foundations of human dignity, which is understood as the foundation of human rights according to international law. But what is the basis of human dignity cannot be answered by any legal text, it’s a philosophical issue. I argue to take a new look at this issue on the basis of two frameworks of the contemporary analytic philosophy: the project of naturalisation and the research on the relation of metaphysical grounding. In such a way, this chapter outlines the background for the main claim of the book, which is that human rights are grounded in human nature.

What does it mean that human rights derive from human dignity? And what is the foundation of human dignity? How are human dignity and its foundation connected? Is the recent development of natural sciences dealing with human nature, like evolutionary psychology, relevant to these questions? The book addresses these points by connecting the discussion on the foundations of human rights with the recent claims regarding human nature made in evolutionary psychology, and with contemporary analytic metaphysics, especially the relation of metaphysical grounding. It offers in-depth insights into the so-called naturalistic approach to human rights, together with detailed proposals on how the approach could be truly naturalized in the philosophical sense. It shows how human rights and human dignity may have foundations in natural facts about human nature and offers a detailed analysis of how the “is” / “ought” gap problematic can be solved.The book also addresses the objection of Western ethnocentrism – unlike most of the contemporary philosophical accounts of human rights, which draw on highly individualistic Western concepts, it employs concepts like altruism and cooperation.

This paper aims to present how logic may undermine a parliamentary assault on democratic institutions based on the analysis conducted with reference to the so-called Polish constitutional crisis. I analyse whether a law can be reviewed on the basis of this law itself. The Polish Constitutional Tribunal faced such a problem while passing the verdict of 9th March, 2016, regarding the constitutionality of the amendment to the Statute on the Constitutional Tribunal from 22nd December, 2015. This problem, called a ‘verdict paradox’, was claimed to be a type of the Liar paradox. I argue that, contrary to the common view, the problem of the verdict paradox is not based on the Liar paradox; for this purpose, a logical analysis is applied to four variants of a reasoning with regard to the constitutionality of the said amendment. The distinction between two levels of analysis concerning emerging reasonings, namely an abstract level and a concrete level placed in the context of the legal system, is also introduced. This paper demonstrates that although only two variants of the reasoning concerning a law’s judicial review based on the law itself involve logical contradiction, the possibility of employing reasonings from other variants must be excluded, albeit due to alternative reasons. Therefore, the Constitutional Tribunal’s decision to avoid the verdict paradox by passing over the reviewed provisions in the review process was correct and might be perceived as an example of how logic and reason can defend the institutional guarantees of political freedom.

The paper analyzes whether human nature can be the foundation of human rights. To this end, in the first part, the concept of the nature of an object is considered. The author considers three understandings of the concept “nature of X”: (1) the set of necessary (or essential) properties of all X-es, (2) ideal or pattern, which X-es can or should strive to and (3) a statistically dominant tendency (or tendencies) characterizing all X-es as a genre although not always characterizing every individual X. The J. Wroblewski’s idea of distinguishing factual, ethical and logical understanding of nature is introduced. These understandings are then analyzed, especially when it comes to the question of whether they are descriptive or normative, In the second part, each of the accounts is applied to considerations of human nature. Next, the author considers whether any of these conceptions of human nature can be recognized as the foundation of human rights. In the following part, the author examines the concept of ‘human dignity’ and its relation to human nature. Finally, the paper shows which understandings of human nature can entail human rights.