Nihilism's conscience: Grounding human rights after Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsch

The idea of human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other key documents of international law today faces grave theoretical as well as political challenges from many fronts. In the light of ongoing debates about the sources and meanings of "rights" I seek to answer the question: Can we have the right (or rights) without the good, that is, without "thick" moral foundations? In a pluralistic world that knows the perils of religiously motivated violence and intolerance all too well, is the only alternative to fundamentalist zealotry (or philosophical dogmatism) some form of ungrounded moral relativism, emotivism, or pragmatism? Or is it in fact impossible to have a robust, persuasive, and sustainable account of human dignity, equality, and rights without appealing to essentially religious or metaphysical understandings of personhood? In this dissertation I focus in particular on the challenge of post-Enlightenment skepticism for the idea of human rights through a critical examination of three nineteenth-century thinkers who perhaps more than anyone else set the stage for our contemporary discontent: Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche. All three provided vital insights into social realities that cannot be ignored yet their theories also pose grave problems for rights advocates. In response to the philosophical materialisms of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche, I seek to trace a broadly ecumenical, self-reflexive, and non-dogmatic approach to rights that at the same time builds on particularist religious understandings. We cannot have a rationally coherent and normatively compelling political ethic or discourse of human rights, I argue, without a metaethics that either implicitly or explicitly finds its moorings in essentially religious or metaphysical ways of thinking.