A universalidade dos direitos humanos sob a ótica da Lei Natural de John Finnis

Abstract

Human rights have undergone a process of growing international positivism throughout the twentieth century, through international treaties, in search of the guarantee of human dignity. However, some States deny the alleged universality of these rights, on the grounds that it is a Western view of human rights, which does not respect the plurality of conceptions of dignified life. The objective of this work was to demonstrate how John Finnis’s theory responds to this question, based on his theory of Natural Law, which has as its thesis the existence of a law whose normativity is independent of political authority or the establishment of a positive law. The question that was intended to be answered was: considering that the definition of a decent life depends on concrete aspects, how can one philosophically base human rights in universal terms? It is a research with a qualitative approach, which used bibliographical and documentary research. As a main result, it was concluded that Finnis’ theory brings substantial elements to understand human rights as the basic rights needed, so that every human being can live with dignity.