The Chain of Human Rights to Morphological Freedom

The right to life, the right to not have other people prevent oneself from surviving, is a central right, without which all other rights have no meaning. But to realize the right to life we need other rights. Another central right for any humanistic view of human rights is the right to seek happiness. Without it human flourishing is unprotected, and there is not much point in having a freedom to live if it will not be at least a potentially happy life. In a way the right to life follows from...

 Human Rights

After ages of error, after wandering in all the mazes of vague and defective theories, writers upon politics and the law of nations at length arrived at the knowledge of the true rights of man, which they deduced from this simple principle: that he is a being endowed with sensation, capable of reasoning upon and understanding his interests, and of acquiring moral ideas. They saw that the maintenance of his rights was the only object of political union, and that the perfection of the socia...

 Looking at babies attentively makes us treat them differe...

Until very recently doctors didn't use analgesia when they operated on small babies, because they thought their minds were too primitive to really feel pain or to remember it if they did. This is a dramatic example, but it often seems as if we discount children's pain compared with adult pain. Child abuse isn't evil because it may produce neurotic adults but because it abuses children. Divorce doesn't have a cost because it may produce adults who have difficulty with relationships but because...