Justifying Human Rights: Perry, Kohen, and the Overlapping Consensus

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Matthew S. Mitchell is a recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School with a concentration in Religion, Ethics, and Politics.

Notes

1. The imaginary woman, Sarah, is a character that Perry employs to demonstrate his point about Christian love in “The Morality of Human Rights: A Nonreligious Ground?” (2005) and notes that the love that Sarah exemplifies “is, obviously, an ideal. Moreover, it is, for most human beings, an extremely demanding idea; for many persons, it is also an implausible ideal” (Perry 2007: 10).

2. See Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent (2000).

3. See Donnelly's substantially revised second edition of Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (2003).