Kant's 3-Strand Model Essay

Over the past half-century, the prominence and relevance of human rights have permeated the social fabric of human culture. As a moral construct, human rights have become an important subject of international affairs and continue to operate as the theoretical framework in which the human condition is analyzed and debated throughout the modern world. In this essay, I will discuss the gradual progression of human rights within a non-linear historical framework that uses the 3-strand model discussed in class and is consistent with a Henkinian point of view.
The concept of human rights, as fundamental and universal component of the human experience, has emerged throughout different periods of human history (Burgers, 447). However, a logical argument can be made that prior to the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948), the idea itself, only existed …show more content…
For instance, individuals such as Immanuel Kant and Jean-Henri Dunant both reasoned that human suffering was the ultimate outcome of war and thus, every effort should be made to limit its practice between hostile nations. In the case of Immanuel Kant, five central ideas were proposed in the form of a peace program that would be enforced by international institutions as a means of preventing war (Source, Kant’s book). In contrast, Jean-Henri Dunant believed that human suffering because of war should be limited based on a designation system that would differentiate between combatants and non-combatants during time of war. Ultimately, as the idea of human suffering became a fundamentally vital component of human rights discourse, the concept of revolutionary humanitarianism proposed by Hannah Arendt during the 1920’s emerged as a viable mechanism that could both afford basic rights to individuals caught in a combat zone and circumvent human