Human Rights and Pure Reason was published by Human Rights Activists in Iran. This book analyzes fundamental concepts in human rights and proposes a theory on human rights. The book is available for download at the end of this text.
Base on what reasons a government should give its citizens the freedom of speech, freedom of political parties and organizations? This is the question which the author of the book, Amin Ghazaei, asks in the beginning of the book. He then presents the common answers to this question and explains that none of the answers provide a rational reasoning for the governments to abide by the human rights.
The author presents rational and theoretical reasoning against sentimental and emotional reasonings for human rights issues. He also believes that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, although convincing, provides no rational reasoning to prove human rights claims.
Thus, there is only one way to disarm violators of human rights and that is using theoretical and philosophical reasoning. The method that uses definitions and fundamentals of pure rational, proves the human rights as an unconditional, universal, and a priori discourse and disarms human rights violators. The author introduces theory of “Priori Rights” and presents a precise criterion to define its limitations: “a person is allowed to do anything unless his actions obstruct others’ actions”. However, since the author believes that human rights are not merely a claim but an absolute resultant of undeniable rational principles, he feels the necessity to present a system where not only the deducted rights are stemmed from rational principles, but there is possibility to infer any of these rights from the other rights.
This way, any of the basic rights like the right to life, right to expression, and the right to own are inferred from the simplest rational and humane principles as well as “positive law” , other rights can be inferred and proven considering the relations between these rights with other basic principles. In general, reading this book is a guide for human rights activists to proceed from “Human Rights Convention” to “Comprehensive Principles of Human Rights”.
The book can be downloaded here.