The universality of rights: John Humphrey, Henri Bergson and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

One of the central challenges of globalization is negotiating the tension between the universal and the particular. This tension is most clearly manifested in contemporary human rights. Using MacIntyre's Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry as a foil, I argue that the Greek Fathers of the Christian Church provide an alternative way to think through the relationship between the universal and the particular. After expanding upon this alternative tradition, I turn to the beginning of the contemporary human rights project. The journals of John P. Humphrey, one of the chief drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, shows that he was profoundly influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and in fact regarded the Declaration as a kind of legal transliteration of Bergson's philosophy of the open society. A careful analysis of Bergson's philosophy, aided by the robust neo-Thomist critique of Bergson by Jacques Maritain, establishes an affinity between Humphrey's vision of the contemporary human rights project and the Greek Patristic tradition. I conclude that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, understood in a Bergsonian context, provides us with a way to affirm in the Modern context that there is a ground to human fellowship which is transcendent and which offers a basis to affirm a universal ethics without a radical homogenization of cultures.