Moral Dimensions of Human Rights

Overview of Human Rights Literature

Many books on human rights either concentrate on human rights as fundamental moral rights with little attention to international human rights, or discount moral human rights and focus on international human rights. The Moral Dimensions of Human Rights takes a broad approach by discussing all three species of human rights - moral, international, and national - at length.

At the same time, Carl Wellman pays special attention to the moral reasons that are relevant to each kind of human rights. The book has three parts. In the first, Wellman develops an original view of the nature and grounds of moral human rights based on his previous publications in the general theory of rights, especially Real Rights.

The next part explains how moral human rights are relevant both to the justification and to the interpretation of human rights in international law and identifies several other relevant moral considerations. In the third part, the author argues that different kinds of moral and international human rights ought to be incorporated into national legal systems in four distinct ways—recognition in a written constitution, judicial decisions, legislation, and ratified human rights treaties.