Vol. XXXVIII / 1 - Studia Moralia

104 MARTIN MCKEEVER
an extremely long history of ethics. Different schools and
methods of ethics, in fact, are distinguished from one another
on the basis of how they conceive of what is good for human
beings and how they believe this good should be realized.
To the specific question: What makes driving a tank over
unarmed students morally wrong?, one of the most common
answers offered today is “because it is against human rights”. In
such a response, human rights discourse is being used as an
ethical category in the sense that the action is classified as
morally wrong on the basis of a set of criteria supplied by, or
implicit in, the idea of human rights. Such a manner of
discussing moral issues, particularly of a social nature, has
become so common that we tend to take it for granted, perhaps
overlooking the fact that it constitutes yet another way of doing
ethics. But is there not something strange and contorted about
saying that what makes driving over students morally wrong is
the fact that they have a human right not to be driven over? The
purpose of this article is to attend carefully to this way of using
human rights discourse and notice some of the problems
involved in reasoning in this way, particularly in the context of
contemporary culture.
In what follows, after a number of preliminary comments,
this usage of human rights discourse will be examined in three
different perspectives which we will call pragmatic (meaning
specific choices and actions concerning human rights claims)
semantic (meaning the evolution and current nuances of the
term “human rights” as a linguistic construction) and normative
(meaning the collocation of human rights discourse in
systematic ethical theory). It is this third perspective which is of
primary interest here. Since human rights discourse is used as
an ethical category both in “secular” and in “ecclesial”
discussions, and since on this score these two forms of discourse
overlap to such a considerable degree, we will develop the main
argument of this piece in the idiom of “secular” ethics, limiting
the treatment of the specifically theological aspects of the issue
to a separate, concluding section.