Where Do Human Rights Come From?

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 12 April 2019

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You don't have to be religious to believe that, as the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, "all human beings have the right to be free and treated equally." However, drawing on a wide range of examples including Shakespeare's Richard III to Disney's Jiminy Cricket, New Generation Thinker Dafydd Mills Daniel argues that the UN's emphasis on "reason and conscience" as the drivers of liberty and equality make the modern conception of human rights more religious, and less liberal, than both secular proponents and conservative critics have supposed.

Dafydd Mills Daniel is the McDonald Departmental Lecturer in Christian Ethics and Theology at Jesus College, University of Oxford. He is researching Newton and alchemy

The Essay was recorded at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select 10 academics each year who can turn their research into radio.

Producer: Jacqueline Smith

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps
0:21.2	it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream
0:26.1	van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.
0:33.3	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:43.2	Hi, I'm Eleanor Rosamund Barakuff, and thanks for downloading this BBC Arts and Ideas podcast,
0:48.8	a talk recorded at Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival by Daffirth Mills Daniel.
0:54.3	He's a new generation thinker on the scheme the BBC runs with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to put some of our foremost young researchers on the air. One of Dapheth's books is called
1:00.4	briefly 25 great philosophers from Plato to Sarch. I just love that briefly, don't you? In his day job,
1:08.1	he teaches Christian ethics and theology at the University of Oxford and argues that we can't make sense of many of our current political and ethical debates without understanding their historical context.
1:21.1	Today, he's here to ask, where do human rights come from? Welcome to the stage, Dapheth Mills, Daniel.
1:33.2	In 2006, a criminal called Barry Chambers, climbed on top of a building and stayed there for 20
1:39.1	hours. While he was up there, he threw bricks down at police and local residents.
1:45.0	Fatigued by his exploits, chambers requested some sustenance,
1:49.0	some Kentucky fried chicken, and the police duly obliged,
1:54.0	saying, although he's a nuisance, we still have to look after his human rights.
1:59.0	It was an incident the Sun newspaper joyfully declared,
2:03.2	finger-knicking good.
2:07.2	Of course, there is no right to fried chicken,
2:09.5	so it was curious that chambers and the police
2:11.9	should claim that there was one, while also
2:14.0	suggesting that a right to a takeaway was just
2:16.5	as significant as the rights of the people underneath chambers falling bricks.
	...

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