What Are Human Rights?

Human rights are, and will always be an incredibly complex issue within sociology, and any other social science discipline for the matter. Dealing with human life means encountering multiple ethical and controversial factors, including – what constitutes a human life, how a human should be treated, and whether human rights are universally conceived as the same thing, not just by scholars but by the general public, in different societies worldwide. Consequently, the issue, as Turner (1993) identifies, has been largely ignored within the discipline of sociology. When examining multiple literature, one can conclude that there are different stances to the issue which emphasise the complexity of asking the question “what are human rights”? In the forthcoming paragraphs one shall put forward the argument that human rights are completely and utterly, a social phenomenon, constructed by those in power and entirely relative to the society or organisation in which they are being exerted. To do this, one shall use the sociological literature of Malcolm Waters (1996) to justify and support the argument this essay will be putting forward. Of course, there are limitations to this approach, however to gain some support of comparison, one shall also review the challenging views of a universalistic, approach to human rights, here coined by a sociologist and believer that frailty and human weakness is the factor which enables human rights to be a universal phenomenon – Brian Turner (1993). Walter’s argument was written with Turner’s argument in mind, which brings a more focused, specific response to alternate ideas. Regardless of whether these sociological perspectives exist, what is important is what determines the most useful and one, however, ju...

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