Human rights as implementation of justice in Ricoeur

Abstract

We consider that Paul Ricoeur's reflection on justice can be an important way to the demand about making Human Rights (HR) socially relevant. Ricoeur's conception of justice is interconnected with the prerogatives of the moral standards and in dialogue with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), especially in the reflection we propose from the Ricoeurian hermeneutic-phenomenological method on HR as the delimit criterion for the effective implementation of justice. Here we highlight three fundamental points of ricoeurian thinking: equality towards distributive justice, legal recognition, in view of the acceptance of alterity independently of hegemonic social conceptions and, finally, the implementation of just institutions as the way to guarantee and protect HR. Therefore, by uniting these three principles, we realize the correlation that Ricoeur establishes between justice and HR, as well as the importance of jus-philosophical reflection to shed new light on the search for the effectiveness of HR, found in the real possibility of achieving justice for all human beings.