Human Rights, Modernity, and Milton'sAreopagitica

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3971005
AutoresWillard Walker (0000-0002-3356-8036, UNSW Sydney, autor de correspondencia), William Walker (UNSW Sydney)
Año2018
Volumen23
Número4
Páginas365-381
Fecha de publicación2018-05-19
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe European Legacy (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1084-8770 • E-ISSN: 1470-1316
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10848770.2018.1433386
OpenAlexW2792658524
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas27

Some of the founding documents of our modern human rights culture assert that, by virtue of natural law, the will of God, the will of a Supreme Being, or some kind of natural world order, all humans have a right to civil liberties. In Areopagitica (1644), Milton rejects this way of grounding the claim to civil liberties. Instead, he argues for civil liberties on pragmatic grounds, but also on the premise that members of political societies are entitled to civil liberties from their governors only insofar as those members are rational and virtuous. His argument for civil liberties is also grounded in the view that the proper function of government includes propagating virtue in those it governs, assessing their rationality and moral virtue, and extending civil liberties to them in accordance with this assessment. Arguing in this way, Milton opposes the notion that, simply by virtue of being human, all members of political societies have a specific set of rights which their governments, and indeed all other people on earth, are bound to respect. He thus has more in common with Isocrates and Renaissance humanists than he does with the defenders of our modern human rights culture

Civil liberties · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Human rights · Humanism · Law and economics · Modernity · Natural law · Political science · Politics · Premise · Rationality · Sociology · Virtue · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought