DIFFICULTIES OF INTERPRETING THE CONCEPT OF "HUMAN RIGHTS": A LOGICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECT

Olena  Shcherbyna; Serghiy  Zayets

doi:10.17721/2523-4064.2024/10-11/11

Authors

Olena Shcherbyna Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2931-7530
Serghiy Zayets Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2931-7530

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17721/2523-4064.2024/10-11/11

Keywords:

human rights, concept of human rights, legal concept, logical analysis of a concept, vagueness, impreciseness

Abstract

B a c k g r o u n d . The article examines the concept of human rights. This concept in modern philosophical discourse is both vague and imprecise. Although most authors recognize the lack of unanimity in the definition of the concept of human rights, few have tried to find out the reasons for this situation. The purpose of this study is to identify the sources of the problematic definition of the concept of human rights by means of a logical analysis of the concept and to propose ways to overcome the identified difficulties in the interpretation of this concept.

M e t h o d s. A philosophical hermeneutic approach combined with a comparative and terminological analysis of the concept of human rights was used in the study.

R e s u l t s . Human rights discourse is fundamentally open: it is normatively undetermined, and anyone can join it. It is therefore inevitably polyphonic and multilingual. As a result, this discourse contains very different understandings of the most important thing: what human rights really are. Efforts to find a universal definition of the concept of human rights seem to be an attempt to unite under one roof things that are poorly or not at all combined: different ontological understandings, different scopes of the concept, and different logical characteristics.

C o n c l u s i o n s. The difficulty of logical analysis of the concept of human rights, i.e. its assignment to a specific type, and its unambiguous interpretation and definition, is related to: 1) the lack of definition of the limits of scope of the concept of human rights in philosophical discourse and the insufficient definition of the limits of this concept as a legal notion; 2) the need to assess the legitimacy of the retrospective extrapolation of the term ‘human rights' to the entire body of works created before the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in which it was not used (in the Ukrainian context, this aspect is not obvious due to historical and linguistic peculiarities); 3) different ontological understanding of human rights by different actors in the discourse that makes it impossible to combine their positions under the same umbrella (e.g. according to one position, human rights are seen as anthropological attributes of a person; according to another, they are norms regulating social relations).

The above testifies to the complexity of an unambiguous logical characteristic of the analyzed concept. It seems that thе situation does not allow for a single definition of the concept of "human rights". It is assumed that it is not a single concept, but a plurality of concepts. In this case, the position of the discourse participant in relation to a certain system of criteria and its justification may be a way to overcome the difficulties we have identified.

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