This article aims to provide a more naturalistic account of the theory of human rights, from which it will be clear that even human rights, in as far as we can speak of them as basic moral requirements, are dependent on individual societies and their development, since morality itself is dependent on society and the individuals living within it. Human rights are not a matter of adhering to norms handed down to us by divine powers or by some other superior being or non-being. This approach thus has the advantage that there is no need to invoke supernatural entities or to look for the origins of human rights somewhere beyond the world and the society in which we live, because the sole source of normativity is found in society itself.
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This text provides a descriptive theory of human rights within the context of cultural evolution in order to clarify their function and importance. The account offered here is therefore not a justificatory theory, but rather an explicative one. Within this text, the concept of cultural evolution will be presented and applied to the issue of human rights.
The first section serves as the starting point of this text and defines the concept and basic precepts of the more naturalistic theory. This approach is not intended to suggest that everything can be reduced to physical and chemical laws. As we will demonstrate, man is a discursive being, and this is because we have a language through which we create, in Peregrin's words, a fantastic world in which we live where we are not subject to the limitations of the natural world in which everything is governed by natural laws; instead, we inhabit a world of freedom - a normative world of rules in which we are free to choose whether or not to follow them.
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As complex organisms that create a normative space within which we live
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, humans differ from other organisms, and it is our unique capacity of normative thinking which has allowed cultural evolution to play a role in our development in addition to Darwinian evolution.
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In the next section, we will address the concept of cultural evolution itself, an issue which is of interest not only to cognitive scientists and philosophers but also to social scientists and legal scholars, as it deals with, among other topics, the evolution of society and the role of norms within it. This section will also focus on the development of morality, since human rights can be seen as basic moral requirements. This is followed by a discussion Tomasello's theory of the origin and development of morality. Here, too, there is no need to invoke the eternal and immutable, a supernatural element; it is instead sufficient to understand that we are organisms which exist as a part of society and of our environment which we share with other human beings, but at the same time we ourselves can change and co-create this environment.
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These theories will be applied within the specific context of human rights, with the conclusion of the text demonstrating that the idea of universal human rights can be seen as the next stage of cultural evolution.
Discussions of the nature of human rights often refer to them as being intuitive.
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Within the framework of evolution and cultural evolution, a moral sense has been "shaped" within us, and this allows us to unconsciously recognize another human being as an equal, as one of "us". As we will see, however, this feeling is always formed within a reference group. Human rights, then, can be seen as basic moral requirements that are intended to be universal in character, thereby enabling the creation of a global "we", a conception which supersedes the earlier idea of "we" as comprising a single nation or culture which is differentiated from others from a different culture or practising different customs. of course, moral norms themselves are the result of a process of cultural evolution
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, with their origins lying within a specific societal context.
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The concept of cooperation plays an important role in evolution and cultural evolution and is therefore worthy of further examination. As will become apparent, cooperation between humans was more profitable for the long-term viability of our species. This cooperation originally emerged within smaller groups, but as human communities gradually grew in size, it became more important for members of each group to follow rules in order that they be considered by the other members to be "one of us"; this arrangement also gives rise to the dichotomy between "us" and "the others"
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. Human rights have the potential to
