Human Rights: Fact Or Fancy?

In his provocative and highly readable study, Human Rights: Fact or Fancy?, Henry B. Veatch finds the basis for human rights in natural law. He builds his argument step by step, carefully laying the foundation for his central assertion that our basic rights are discoverable directly in the facts of nature. Although the bulk of contemporary concern is with the law only and not with ethics, Veatch insists that this approach is mistaken because it leaves no place for what Aristotle called "a natural justice." Law must be based on ethics, he maintains, and ethics in turn must be grounded in fact and therefore must have a basis in nature.

Henry Babcock Veatch (1911-1999) obtained his PhD from Harvard in 1937 and spent his career at Indiana University, Northwestern University, and Georgetown, where he was Philosophy Department Chair from 1973 to 1976. Veatch was a proponent of rationalism, an authority on Thomistic philosophy, and one of the leading neo-Aristotelian thinkers of his time. He is the author of many books, including Rational Man and For an Ontology of Morals.