O jusnaturalismo neoclássico como substrato hermenêutico dos direitos humanos

Abstract

This dissertation aims to demonstrate the correlation between neoclassical natural law theory and the hermeneutical territoriality of human rights, presenting this strand of natural law as the theoretical matrix that best aligns with the concept of fundamental human rights. Natural law theory in its essential core establishes a necessary connection between law and its content and, historically, several historicalphilosophical perspectives through which natural law theory has occurred present a series of possible theoretical perspectives in understanding this bond and its foundation. Initially, the study seeks to demonstrate how Thomas Aquinas, as the paradigmatic exponent of natural law theory, structured the connections surrounding the concept of natural law, its relationship with human law and its association with human nature through practical reasonableness. In a second moment, the work also intends to explore how, in contemporaneity, John Finnis develops the AristotelianThomistic understanding of human nature, as well as the various legal and political issues these themes entail. Finally, the dissertation analyses the constitution of legal subjectivity throughout modernity and the structuring of human rights within the contemporary Western legal framework, exploring the transmutation of natural law thought into the secular and rationalist territory in which contemporary State is rooted, as well as the hermeneutic consequences of human rights legal discourse within national constitutions and legal systems. We thus conclude that the legal framework of subjective rights is deeply underpinned in the ontoteleological conception of human being that natural law thought has developed over centuries, making natural law the most appropriate theoretical foundation not only for human rights in strict sense but also fundamental rights and subjective rights in general in their most varied aspects.