The International Declaration of Human Rights and the generalization of values: Memory and scandal in the genealogy of subjective rights

Abstract

The present work will analyze how the concept of generalization of values, brought by Hans Joas, can throw light on the foundation of human rights. After the Nuremberg Tribunal, moral skepticism develops an internal criticism of legal positivism because the latter has made possible the Holocaust. Due to a paradigmatic crisis regarding the realization of universal values in the Nation State, the observance of affirmative juridical guarantees of the person acquires supremacy in the international jurisdiction. The purpose of this paper is to clarify how the affirmation of human rights relates to the history of the idea of a human person. In order to fulfill this task, the genealogical method proposed by Joas is used to investigate how the idea of person contributed to the construction of a normative language of universalizing pretensions in human rights. According to Joas, the idea of a person has a normative character in the West because of its Christian foundations and how these foundations were used by US federalists to combat sanctions that threaten integrity, which were punished by the notion of scandal.