İNSAN HAKLARI

After the French Revolution, the idea of human rights first emerged in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789.

With Cicero, the source of natural law had been God, and the idea of God thus emerged in the stage of history.

According to the Sophists nature is perfect, immutable and eternal, whereas according to Plato ideal beings are perfect, immutable and eternal.

According to Plato, justice is the fulfillment of the duties and obligations of each class in the society.

Plato considers justice as a master virtue in comparison with other virtues.

Plato considers justice as a master virtue in comparison with other virtues?

According to Plato, the best polity is the monarchy which is governed by a philosopher king.

According to Aristotle, the state was established for the good of all. The purpose of the state is the happiness of all its citizens.

According to Aristotle, equality is logically superior to justice, because without equality, there is not a justice?

For Hobbes, justice is an obligation to keep promises and to obey the law, whereas injustice is to violate the law.

Greek philosophy is a convenient starting point to uncover the origins of human rights. Indeed, we need to look at the history of the concepts of natural law and justice in ancient Greek philosophy, if we want to examine the original beginnings of the idea of human rights. In Ancient Greek philosophy, to distinguish changing things from unchanging ones is considered an important issue. And the law of nature is seen as universal, immutable and eternal a set of regularities or of repeated patterns.These philosophers consider justice and injustice as if they are universal laws or laws of nature rather than concepts created by humanity. But Heraclitus apprehends that justice and injustice were man-made, and that God does not care about either. The correct answer is Choice A.

After Presocratic philosophers, the sophists were interested in human, society and political affairs rather than nature. Their most important characteristic was the critical attitude towards knowledge, truth and laws. They believed that knowledge is relative and that social rules are not universal and immutable. The Sophists set physis, which means natural, against nomos, which means social law, and they set individual opinions against tradition. The most important contribution to the idea of natural law was the account of the Stoics. “The most dramatic mutation in the early relationship between physis and nomos was introduced by the Stoics” (Douzinas, 2000, 31). The Stoics claimed that people have certain rights by nature. They placed natural law at the center of ethics and politics.

Plato thinks that no polity can survive, if it does not apply natural right to politics. Plato’s theory of forms had been decisive on his other philosophical views. He states that concepts like justice, state and good exist as ideas in the intelligible world. So, when Plato talks about a state, he means an ideal state or the idea of state. Plato sees three classes in a state. The classes of a state are rulers (governors of the state), auxiliaries (soldiers or defenders) and producers (farmers, artisans, etc.). The correct answer is Choice C.

Plato stated his political views, namely, his understanding of the justice (dikaiosyne) and the state, in his famous work called Republic. The question of justice or the concept of justice is at the center of his philosophy, especially in his Republic. 

According to Aristotle, human beings are not self-sufficient, and they need others in order to be self-sufficient; therefore, the state is necessary for human beings’ abilities and also for the realization of justice.

The correct answer is Choice C.

The early Greek philosophers take for granted that nothing comes from nothing. But with the birth of Christianity, it is believed that God created the world from nothing. Patristic philosophy (the philosophy of church fathers) used the term ‘natural law’ in sense of divine command. Also, the conception of human in medieval philosophy is different from the conception of Greek philosophy. First, it conceived the human being as a being created by God, unlike in Greek philosophy. Secondly, every individual is born with original sin and the human world is full of sin and injustice. The correct answer is Choice B.

According to Augustine, justice is a divine attribute, and it does not belong to this world (earthly state), and it can only be realized in the city of God. Another Medieval philosopher, Thomas Aquinas followed partially the classical theory of justice in his works. Unlike Augustine, Aquinas was an Aristotelian philosopher in many respects. He also followed the Stoic philosophy concerning natural law. Aquinas believed that human dignity and value are innate properties which are validated according to “natural law”. Also, there is close similarity between Aquinas’ justice and Aristotle’s conception of general justice. For Aquinas, justice is constituted by a reference to the other person. The correct answer is Choice E.

From Plato to early modernity, philosophy investigated the best polity for human and the teleological reasons of the state and laws. Thomas Hobbes presented a new method for analyzing legal foundations and redefined the traditional juridical concepts of law, right and justice. He is also the founder of the modern tradition of individual rights and the first philosopher to replace fully the concept of justice with the idea of rights. The correct answer is Choice C.

Locke’s description of the state of nature is different from that of Hobbes. “John Locke’s political writings are commonly presented as the early manifesto of liberalism and as the opposite of Hobbes’ ‘totalitarianism’”.

Like Hobbes’ political philosophy, the hypothesis of state of nature was the basis of political constitution in Locke’s political philosophy.

In his major works, The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau stated his political thoughts with reference to the concepts of freedom and equality. These two concepts, according to him, are fundamental rights which nature provides to people. Therefore, his political theory is based on the concept of natural law. In addition to Hobbes’ and Locke’s fundamental innate rights, such as life, freedom and property, Rousseau also expresses social and economic rights in his theory of social contract. Rousseau thus extended the social contract tradition beyond the individualism of Hobbes and Locke to incorporate the role of community in his work The Social Contract, in which he argued that the community must represent the general will of people.

The correct answer is Choice E.

According to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who described the Enlightenment as the “Age of Reason”, reason is the foundation of all moral actions. For Kantian ethics, humans are autonomous beings and are responsible for their actions. Kantian autonomous subject was universal legislator and its each particular action can be judged by reason or by universal principles. Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason is the foundation of modern jurisprudence. The correct answer is Choice D.

The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who made a utilitarian critique of the theory of natural law and the concept of natural rights, developed an early form of legal positivism. He denied many concepts such as natural rights, state of nature and social contract, since these rights are not observable and enforceable for him.

Kant wanted to make it clear that human rights were distinct from those civil rights accorded to citizens of a state by the government of that state. This is why he proposed a triangular structure of rights: first, the civil rights of individuals within their nation-states; second, the international rights of states in their dealings with one another; and third, the cosmopolitan rights of individuals and states as existing interdependently in a universal state of humankind. Central to his theorizing is the essential oneness of the human race. For Kant, people have rights simply because they share the earth’s surface.

Thomas Paine was a radical and democratic republican who believed in the sovereignty of the individual person, and he was also an early advocate of the right of the people.

The correct answer is Choice A.