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The purpose of this chapter is to articulate an understanding of basic human rights that is sufficiently clear and cogent to serve as the core of a justice‐based moral theory of international law. To accomplish this goal, the concept of human rights is first analysed into its key elements, and the analysis is used to explain how assertions about human rights can be justified, and show that plausible justifications for basic human rights can be grounded in a diversity of moral and religious perspectives. Next, several objections to the claim that there are human rights or that they can play a fundamental role in a moral theory of international law are refuted, and it is argued that the right to minimally democratic governance should be included among the rights that international law ascribes to all persons—whether it is a human right or of instrumental value in securing human rights, or both. It is then shown that the use of coercion to protect basic human rights is compatible with a proper tolerance for the diversity of values, and the chapter concludes with a discussion of how the international legal order can cope with the ineliminable abstractness of human rights norms. The seven parts of the chapter are: I. Clarifying the Idea of Human Rights; II. The Justification of Assertions about the Existence of Human Rights; III. A Plurality of Converging Justifications for Human Rights; IV. Is democracy a Human Right?; V. Critiques of Human Rights; VI. Human Rights and the Bounds of Toleration; and VII. The Inelimable Indeterminacy of Human Rights and its Implications for the Moral Theory of International Law.

The very fact that human beings share a space, in which their bodies, as physical masses, cannot occupy the same place, raises the need for political existence. This is because bodily existence is directly tied to the emergence of relations of power. Bodily existence makes human beings not only subjects of power, but also objects of power. This fact necessitates a civilization, i.e., a second birth of human beings. These connections are best seen when we compare the human situation to that of angels. It is because human beings, unlike angels, have an (empirical) body, that they require a political order. Such a political order is thus to be contrasted both with a-historical paradisiacal conditions, as well as with the para-empirical notion of a “natural man,” as Ibn Khaldûn has shown through his distinction between a “hypothetically” and an “empirically” proceeding political science.

Genesis has two levels or focal points – history of Israel (the patriarchs) and human life (or human existence). Both are important and indispensable, but for Genesis, human life is the more fundamental of the two, and so the book is structured not according to the diversity of patriarchs but according to diverse aspects of human life, including space, time (the flow of generations), and stages of life and perception. As Israel's history is accompanied by a further level of meaning (namely human life), so also is Israel's land; “land” in Genesis means more than specific territory.

This chapter seeks to determine what solutions might exist to the numerous problems that amour-propre imposes on human existence. The first section discusses Rousseau's account of how good social and political institutions can hold the development of inflamed amour-propre in check. The second section examines how the same end is achieved by Emile's domestic education.

This chapter probes whether the Grisez School is able to find a new means to secure the moorings of ethics to the givenness of reality. It explores the relationship between practical reason and the reality and the role of self-evidence in the Grisez School's theory in three stages. First, it considers the relationship between human nature and the fulfilling objects and objectives towards which practical reason directs people. This provides the opportunity to begin an exploration of the question of self-evidence. Second, the chapter analyses the connections between principles of practical reason (which guide people in their pursuit of those fulfilling objects and objectives) and human nature and the conditions of human existence. Third, it considers the function of knowledge about reality in the actual process of moral deliberation.

The rule of law is necessary in every human society. Human beings come together driven by the natural predicament of their bodily existence, which makes them dependent on mutual help. But the association of human beings gives rise to a second, “political,” predicament, insofar as humans, who have entered society for their own benefit and not that of others, may be inclined to prey on others and to become poachers of the common good. That is why a power standing above merely human power must be erected to rule them; this is the power of the law, which is not subject to human whims and desires but is essentially impartial. Such a super-human power gives the law the character of the “Absolute.” This character has been variously interpreted as the power of the divine (Aristotle), of reason (Cicero), or of the nature of things (Hobbes, Anonymous Iamblichi). This reflection shows that there is something in the law that goes beyond a mere human stipulation, namely a universal fore-knowledge of the Just.

This chapter discusses the thought of Henri Bouillard and its significance for Catholic theology before and after Vatican II. It examines Bouillard's understanding of the historical situatedness of faith and the implication this has for the hermeneutics of the church's understanding and expression of that faith. It examines Bouillard's engagement with major Protestant thinkers like Karl Barth, especially his understanding of the logic of faith and its existential and epistemological structures. It considers Bouillard's exploration of the nature of human freedom and divine presence and concludes with some observations on his importance for post‐conciliar theology.

This chapter begins with a discussion of how the sages of Israel, and of the ancient world in general, attempted to make sense of human existence by postulating an intrinsic connection between act and consequence, and thereby lay the basis for a morally significant life. It then examines the book of Job and analyses the biblical Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth).

Anthropogony addresses how human existence manifests the unfinished God as a creative and redemptive process. If there is an essential connection between the inner differentiation of the divine life and the human being’s own inner differentiation, itself external to the divine life, the divine life is to be thought otherwise than in classical orthodoxy. Anthropologically speaking, this is the difference between imago dei and imaginem ad Verbum: the image of God and the image toward the Logos. The bicameral nature of human existence must be thought between two nots: as both becoming and unbecoming, as ascesis and living sacrifice.

This chapter discusses hermeneutic understanding, which is primarily a way of recovering the meaning of utterances and performances of historical agents. However, what distinguishes it from other modes of inquiry is the historical nature of its perception, namely, its claim about the historicality of human existence and the plurality of historical worlds. Advocates of hermeneutic understanding maintain that we can understand the actions and utterances of men and recover the link between life and experience embodied in these expressions only by reconstructing the life of the other. The purpose of a hermeneutic inquiry is twofold: (a) it seeks to understand the other and (b) it opens up new worlds and possibilities to us by making available the life of the other.

This chapter assesses the present state of integration within positive psychology regarding one particular aspect of human experience—meaning—which is central to human existence, regardless of the valence of that meaning. It examines the extent to which meaning is adequately captured in positive psychology perspectives and then describes what seems to be missing from this view at present. As a potential remedy, it proposes the grounding of positive psychological inquiry into issues of meaning and meaning making in an existential spiritual framework. Such a framework could bridge the fairly extensive but distinct work being conducted on meaning and stress-related growth and that on positive psychology, benefitting both areas of inquiry. The chapter concludes with ideas about how research on meaning, so framed, might move forward.

The Cartesian dualism of mind and body is an unsatisfactory sidestepping of the central issues under discussion here. The beginnings of sociality are seen even in the most primordial configurations of living matter. The progressive integration of an organism's “inner life” with its external action and presentation of self was further extended in Homo sapiens with the radical cerebral reorganization that accompanied the transition to human upright posture. Empathy is the ability to identify with and understand the situations, motives, and feelings of another. It is so natural to us that we rarely ponder the mystery of its mechanism. Human existence is by nature intrinsically social, located within the context of community and culture. Insight into the other person enabled by the capacity for empathy can be used for open communication or for calculated deception. The cultural universals seem to cluster around the two central issues of flourishing and freedom.

This chapter shows that an awareness of human mortality is evident throughout the Constitution of 1787 and in its Amendments. It notes that such an awareness is implicit in the traditional civic trinity of “Life, Liberty, and Property.” It observes that the conversion of “Property” into “Pursuit of Happiness,” as in the Declaration of Independence, may acknowledge further the transitory aspects of human existence. It further observes that the Preamble, in expressing the concern of the Framers to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to [them]selves and [their] Posterity,” attempts to build upon the stable elements in our ever-changing lives. It notes that “posterity” suggests that although one may not personally endure forever, at least on Earth, one may have descendants, just as one has had ancestors.

This lecture discusses a new interpretation of Tommaso Campanella's most famous work, the Città del sole, as well as the motivation for the anti-Spanish rebellion in 1599. Campanella, along with a number of writers during the Counter-Reformation, had a rather special interest in the Ottoman Empire. The Città del sole incorporates many features of the Ottoman society and Islamic practice into its idealised picture of a natural human existence.

The chapter justifies disconnecting thinking in the Talmud from a person, either named or anonymous, either historically really, or literary-fictional. More broadly, the chapter disconnects thinking displayed in the Talmud from the notion of a “thinking subject.”

This chapter takes a look at David Mitchell, his writing and his works, showing that Mitchell's writing outlines human existence both transterritorially and as determined by locally specific conditions. It closely studies Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, which categorically decentre individual human experience, and finally looks at Mitchell's representation of globalisation.