The Hierarchy of Human Rights and the Transcendental System of Right

Abstract

This paper analyses the relatively neglected topic of hierarchy in the philosophical foundation of human rights. It develops a transcendental-discursive approach. This approach develops the idea that all human rights could be derived from a small set of fundamental rights that are interconnected and that incorporate all ulterior possible specific rights. This set is then applied to an analysis of human rights as they have been formulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The claim is that this prior set of transcendental rights is discursively implied whenever we talk about human rights. Thinking about the hierarchy of rights pragmatically means thinking about prioritising their implementation. Some consequences for practical philosophy and politics concerning the role of states, enterprises and world citizenship are then discussed.

Civilizational and culturological aspect of philosophical and legal studies of observance of human rights

“…According to scientists (Muller, 2019;Nersessian, 2018), human rights define the space that provides each person with the conditions for his selfrealization, that is, the space of his personal autonomy. They are the moral criteria by which the legal order must be guided.…”