Michael Perry, Peter Singer, and Quasimodo: Persons With Disabilities and the Nature of Rights

Abstract

Michael Perry's The Idea of Human Rights' raises important and difficult issues. One such issue, reformulated, is whether the latter half of the twentieth century has witnessed both the rise of human rights language in international law, and the erosion, if not the collapse, in the intellectual sphere of the theoretical underpinnings of human rights as traditionally understood. This is part of a broader tension, in which the advance of broadly liberal values has coexisted with increasing skepticism about the objectivity of ethics, freedom of the will and genuine moral responsibility, meaningfulness in a natural order, and the irreducibility of mind.