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Books

Nonsense On Stilts? A Quaker View of Human Rights

Mark Frankel examines Quaker perspectives on human rights.

Quakers are non-doctrinaire Christians with a fine tradition of work for peace and social justice. This collection of eight essays by Quaker activists and academics attempts insights into the nature of human rights and the thinking which informs them. It takes its title from the vivid remark of Jeremy Bentham that natural rights are nonsense and inalienable natural rights are ‘nonsense on stilts’. Bentham denied that rights could be deduced from nature, but he would have been quick to agree that basic principles for the protection of the individual could and should be enshrined in law. This collection of essays avoids the abstract question of the naturalness of rights, but takes as read that human have legal rights, and tries to bring a specifically Quaker perspective to the issue.

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