# Appendix B — Intellectual Lineage of the Values Floor *An appendix to the Main Street Independent treatise,* What News Is For. *Published under CC0.* --- ## Preface This appendix establishes the intellectual lineage of a five-element "consensus values floor" affirmed by the *Main Street Independent* publication: (1) **human life and dignity**, (2) **truthfulness**, (3) **accountability of power**, (4) **equality and fairness**, and (5) **informed citizenship**. The appendix does not argue that all human beings, cultures, or political movements agree on every formulation of these values — they manifestly do not. It argues something more modest and more defensible: that at the level of abstraction at which the publication asserts them, these values are *derivable from broad and convergent sources* in human moral and political thought, including the foundational instruments of international law, cross-cultural empirical psychology, the major Western and non-Western philosophical traditions, the religious and wisdom traditions of the world, and the canonical ethical frameworks of journalism itself. The argument from convergence is empirical, not metaphysical. It is bolstered, not weakened, by acknowledging where philosophical and empirical literature is genuinely contested. Section 8 takes those contests seriously. --- ## Section 1 — The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Human Rights Tradition ### 1.1 Drafting history, 1946–1948 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948 (Resolution 217 A (III), Paris) by a vote of 48 in favor, none opposed, and eight abstentions. The drafting had begun in early 1947 under the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt of the United States. The Drafting Committee, originally a three-person nucleus (Roosevelt; Peng-chun Chang of the Republic of China, Vice-Chair; Charles Malik of Lebanon, Rapporteur) was enlarged in April 1947 to include representatives of Australia (William Hodgson), Chile (Hernán Santa Cruz), France (René Cassin), the Soviet Union (Alexander Bogomolov, later Alexei Pavlov), and the United Kingdom (Charles Dukes). John Peters Humphrey of Canada, Director of the UN Secretariat's Division of Human Rights, prepared the initial 408-page documentary blueprint, drawing on a wide survey of constitutions and submissions from member states and NGOs. René Cassin produced the structurally consequential second draft, organizing the document into what he likened to the portico of a Greek temple — preamble (steps), Articles 1–2 (foundation: dignity, liberty, equality, brotherhood), Articles 3–11 (column one: rights of the person), 12–17 (column two: civil/political rights of the individual in society), 18–21 (column three: spiritual, public, political freedoms), 22–27 (column four: economic, social, cultural rights), and Articles 28–30 (pediment: duties and limits). The participants were not interchangeable Westerners. Chang was a Tsinghua- and Columbia-trained playwright, philosopher, and diplomat who explicitly insisted that the Declaration "should reflect more than simply Western ideas," used Confucian categories to break philosophical deadlocks, and pressed for the removal of allusions to "nature" and "God" in order to keep the document genuinely universal. Malik, a Greek-Orthodox Lebanese philosopher trained at Harvard under Whitehead and a serious student of Aquinas, defended a personalist conception of the human being against what he saw as state-corporatist drafts. Santa Cruz of Chile was the principal advocate for socio-economic rights against North Atlantic resistance. Hansa Mehta of India successfully pushed for the change from "All men are born free and equal" to "All human beings are born free and equal" in Article 1 — a small phrase, decisive in international law. Carlos Romulo of the Philippines, Minerva Bernardino of the Dominican Republic, and women delegates working through the parallel UN Commission on the Status of Women contributed sustained pressure for inclusivity. ### 1.2 The 1947 UNESCO survey Anticipating that any declaration would be challenged on the ground that "rights" were a parochial Western invention, UNESCO in early 1947 dispatched a memorandum and questionnaire to roughly 150–170 thinkers worldwide — among them Jacques Maritain, Mahatma Gandhi, Benedetto Croce, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Aldous Huxley, Quincy Wright, Harold Laski, S. V. Puntambekar (writing on the Hindu tradition), Chung-Shu Lo (writing on Chinese tradition), Humayun Kabir (on Islam), Boris Tchechko (on the Soviet conception), and Salvador de Madariaga. Around 60 responses returned. UNESCO published the resulting volume, *Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations* (1949), with an introduction by Maritain. The famous Maritain formula — that the contributors agreed "on a list of practical concepts" while disagreeing on the philosophical "why" — has been correctly criticized by Mark Goodale and others as somewhat overstated; the disagreements were sharper than UNESCO's official narrative suggested. But the more limited finding remains intact: the survey did identify a wide cross-cultural convergence on a set of practical entitlements and protections, even where their metaphysical grounding diverged. That convergence is the same one this appendix is documenting. ### 1.3 Status as customary international law The UDHR is technically a non-binding General Assembly resolution. As Eleanor Roosevelt herself emphasized in her 1948 General Assembly statement, "It is not a treaty; it is not an international agreement... It is a declaration of basic principles of human rights and freedoms." Yet by sustained state practice, judicial citation, and incorporation into national constitutions, very large portions of the UDHR are now generally treated as customary international law, and all 193 UN member states have ratified at least one of the nine binding treaties derived from it. The UDHR is the most-translated document in human history (over 530 language versions on the OHCHR site). ### 1.4 UDHR articles articulating the five floor values Primary text: | Floor value | Principal UDHR provisions | |---|---| | Human life and dignity | Preamble ("inherent dignity"); Art. 1 ("born free and equal in dignity and rights"); Art. 3 ("right to life, liberty and security of person"); Art. 5 (prohibition of torture) | | Truthfulness | Art. 19 ("right to freedom of opinion and expression... to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media"); Preamble ("freedom of speech... has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration") | | Accountability of power | Art. 7 (equality before the law); Art. 8 (effective remedy by competent tribunals); Art. 9 (no arbitrary arrest); Art. 10 (fair and public hearing by independent and impartial tribunal); Art. 21(3) ("the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government") | | Equality and fairness | Art. 1; Art. 2 (non-discrimination); Art. 7 (equal protection of the law); Art. 23(2) (equal pay for equal work) | | Informed citizenship | Art. 19 (freedom to seek and receive information); Art. 21 (participation in government); Art. 26 (right to education) | ### 1.5 ICCPR and ICESCR — the binding operationalization The UDHR's two binding companions, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, adopted 1966; entered into force 23 March 1976; ) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, adopted 1966; in force 3 January 1976; ) collectively form, with the UDHR, the "International Bill of Human Rights." ICCPR Article 6 protects life; Article 14, due process; Article 19, freedom of expression and the right to seek information; Article 25, political participation; Article 26, equality before the law. The ICCPR has 174 state parties as of 2025; the ICESCR has 172. ### 1.6 Regional convergence The independent regional development of human rights instruments — drafted at different times, on different continents, by different jurists, under different political conditions — provides perhaps the strongest single piece of empirical evidence for convergence at the level of abstraction at which the floor is asserted. | Instrument | Year | Body | Notable convergent provisions | |---|---|---|---| | European Convention on Human Rights | 1950 | Council of Europe | Right to life (Art. 2); fair trial (Art. 6); freedom of expression (Art. 10); prohibition of discrimination (Art. 14) | | American Convention on Human Rights ("Pact of San José") | 1969 | Organization of American States | Right to life (Art. 4); judicial protection (Art. 25); freedom of thought and expression (Art. 13); right to participate in government (Art. 23) | | African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights ("Banjul Charter") | 1981 | Organization of African Unity (now AU) | Right to life and integrity of person (Art. 4); equality before the law (Art. 3); freedom of expression and information (Art. 9); participation in government (Art. 13); duty-language reflecting communitarian/Ubuntu ethos | | Arab Charter on Human Rights | 2004 (revised from 1994) | League of Arab States | Right to life (Art. 5); fair trial (Art. 13); freedom of expression (Art. 32); political participation (Art. 24); equality (Art. 11) | | ASEAN Human Rights Declaration | 2012 | Association of Southeast Asian Nations | Right to life (Art. 11); equality before law (Art. 3); freedom of opinion and expression (Art. 23); participation in public affairs (Art. 25) | The Banjul Charter's distinct contribution is its attention to peoples' rights and to duties of the individual to the community — an articulation of the *relational* conception of personhood characteristic of African philosophical thought, not a rejection of the individual rights at the floor's level of abstraction. The ASEAN Declaration was criticized at its adoption (notably by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights) for state-protective qualifications, but its substantive list of rights tracks the UDHR. Convergence at the level of *what is named* as a fundamental entitlement is genuine across all five instruments, even where the *implementation* and the *exceptions* diverge. --- ## Section 2 — Cross-Cultural Psychology of Values ### 2.1 Schwartz's basic values theory Shalom H. Schwartz of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem developed the most heavily replicated cross-cultural theory of human values in contemporary social psychology. His original 1992 model (Schwartz, "Universals in the Content and Structure of Values," *Advances in Experimental Social Psychology* 25: 1–65) identifies ten basic values, each defined as a trans-situational guiding principle: | Value | Defining motivational goal | |---|---| | Self-direction | Independent thought and action | | Stimulation | Excitement, novelty, challenge | | Hedonism | Pleasure, sensuous gratification | | Achievement | Personal success through demonstrating competence | | Power | Social status, control over people and resources | | Security | Safety, harmony, stability of self and society | | Conformity | Restraint of disruptive actions | | Tradition | Respect and acceptance of cultural/religious customs | | Benevolence | Preserving and enhancing the welfare of those one is in frequent contact with | | Universalism | Understanding, appreciation, tolerance, protection of welfare of *all* people and of nature | These ten values arrange themselves in a quasi-circumplex (a circular motivational continuum) along two orthogonal dimensions: openness-to-change vs. conservation, and self-enhancement vs. self-transcendence. The structure is supported by data from samples in more than 80 countries collected with the 56–57-item Schwartz Value Survey (SVS) and the later 40-item Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ). Schwartz's 2012 refinement (Schwartz et al., "Refining the Theory of Basic Individual Values," *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology* 103(4): 663–688; ) divides the same continuum into 19 narrower values, including the splitting of universalism into universalism-nature, universalism-concern (commitment to equality, justice, and protection of all people), and universalism-tolerance, and the splitting of benevolence into benevolence-caring and benevolence-dependability. The PVQ-RR has now been validated across 49 cultural groups (Schwartz & Cieciuch, 2022, in *Assessment*; ), with the theorized circular order of values reproduced in every group. The floor's first value (life and dignity) and fourth value (equality and fairness) map most directly onto Schwartz's *universalism* (especially universalism-concern), with strong contribution from *benevolence*. Truthfulness maps onto benevolence-dependability and onto a more recent honesty/integrity construct repeatedly found at the universalism–benevolence boundary. Accountability of power and informed citizenship are not single Schwartz values but emerge from the *combination* of universalism-concern with self-direction-thought. ### 2.2 Inglehart and the World Values Survey The World Values Survey (WVS), founded by Ronald Inglehart in 1981 and continued by Christian Welzel (current Wave 7 covers 2017–2022, with about 90 societies), has produced the largest existing dataset of cross-cultural value attitudes. Inglehart and Welzel's factor analysis identifies two dominant cross-national dimensions: - **Traditional vs. secular-rational values** — the y-axis. Traditional societies give primacy to religion, parental authority, deference, and traditional family. Secular-rational societies de-emphasize all four. - **Survival vs. self-expression values** — the x-axis. Survival societies prioritize physical and economic security, with low trust and tolerance. Self-expression societies prioritize subjective well-being, environmental protection, gender equality, and political voice. These two dimensions account for over 70% of cross-national variance in their factor model. The Inglehart-Welzel cultural map clusters societies into Protestant European, Catholic European, English-Speaking, Confucian, Orthodox, Latin American, African-Islamic, and South Asian groupings. Several findings are essential for the floor argument: 1. *Convergence in direction.* As economic and physical security improve, societies move predictably toward the upper-right of the map (more secular-rational, more self-expression). The trend is empirical, not normatively imposed. 2. *Persistence of cultural distinctness.* The clusters retain identifying features across waves; modernization does not erase culture. 3. *Floor-level convergence is robust.* Even survival-oriented and traditional societies score very high on questions about the badness of taking innocent life, the desirability of honest conduct, the legitimacy of equality before the law, and the value of education. The variance is in *trade-offs*, not in the floor. ### 2.3 Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory Jonathan Haidt and colleagues at NYU have developed Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), which proposes that human moral cognition rests on a small set of evolved psychological systems. The original five foundations (Haidt & Joseph, 2004; Graham, Haidt & Nosek, 2009) were: - **Care/harm** — sensitivity to suffering and need - **Fairness/cheating** — proportionality and reciprocity - **Loyalty/betrayal** — group commitment - **Authority/subversion** — legitimate hierarchy - **Sanctity/degradation** — purity and contamination A sixth foundation, **liberty/oppression**, was added in 2012, and in 2023 the Atari et al. reformulation split fairness into *equality* and *proportionality*. Liberals tend to weight care, fairness-as-equality, and liberty most heavily; conservatives weight all six approximately equally. For the floor argument, the key observations are: (a) care/harm and fairness are universally identified as moral foundations across every cultural sample tested; (b) cross-cultural studies (Atari et al., 2020 in *Personality and Individual Differences*; Iurino & Saucier, 2020) replicate the basic five-factor structure across WEIRD and non-WEIRD societies, though the relative weighting and item-loadings differ; and (c) the floor's first, fourth, and fifth values map onto the universally-shared care and fairness foundations; the floor's second and third values map onto fairness extended to truth-telling and to constraints on dominators. Haidt himself has been careful to note that the foundations are "first drafts" of moral psychology that culture then elaborates. The floor is consistent with that position. ### 2.4 Pre-cultural moral cognition: the Yale infant studies The Infant Cognition Center at Yale, directed for many years by Karen Wynn with Paul Bloom and Kiley Hamlin, has produced a body of evidence that pre-verbal infants discriminate prosocial from antisocial behavior. The signature studies (Hamlin, Wynn & Bloom, *Nature* 450: 557–559, 2007; ) use a "hill paradigm" in which a Climber attempts to ascend a slope and is alternately helped by one shape (Helper) and impeded by another (Hinderer). At 6 and 10 months of age, infants reliably reach for the Helper. Three-month-olds show a negativity bias against the Hinderer (Hamlin, Wynn & Bloom, 2010). Bloom's *Just Babies* (2013) summarizes the broader claim: rudimentary moral capacities — empathy, compassion, a sense of fairness, evaluation of helpers — appear before extensive cultural learning could produce them. The literature is contested. A major debate concerns whether infants are genuinely making moral evaluations or are responding to perceptual cues such as gaze direction or motion-bouncing (Scarf, Imuta, Colombo & Hayne 2012; reviewed in Hamlin 2015). The most defensible position is the modest one: there is converging evidence for early-emerging discrimination of helpful vs. unhelpful behavior toward third parties, and this is consistent with — though it does not prove — the developmental priority of care/fairness intuitions. That modest claim is what the floor needs. ### 2.5 Section 2 summary Across three independent empirical research programs — Schwartz's values theory replicated in 80+ countries, Inglehart-Welzel's WVS across 90 societies and seven waves, and Haidt's MFT validated in 30+ cultures — the values clustered around *care for human welfare*, *fairness*, *honesty*, and *concern for the in-group's institutions* recur as universal building blocks of moral cognition, even where their weighting and elaboration vary culturally. The Yale infant work provides further (contested but suggestive) developmental evidence that the moral substrate is not a Western cultural product. --- ## Section 3 — Convergent Philosophical Traditions The argument here is structural, not historical: when each major moral and political tradition is stated at the level of abstraction at which the floor is asserted, the traditions converge. They diverge at finer-grained levels — about which actions instantiate the values, about how to trade them off, about their metaphysical grounding. The floor takes no stand on those finer questions. ### 3.1 Western traditions #### Kantian deontology Kant grounds morality in respect (*Achtung*) for persons as ends in themselves. The Categorical Imperative in its Formula of Humanity (*Groundwork*, 4:429) commands: "Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end." Dignity (*Würde*) is contrasted with mere price: persons have dignity, things have price (4:434). The universalizability test of the Formula of Universal Law (4:421) underwrites equality before moral principle. Kant's specific arguments against lying (*Groundwork* and "On a Supposed Right to Lie") ground truthfulness as a near-absolute duty. #### Consequentialism / utilitarianism From Bentham (*Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation*, 1789) through Mill (*Utilitarianism*, 1861; *On Liberty*, 1859), through Henry Sidgwick (*The Methods of Ethics*, 1874), to contemporary preference-utilitarians like R. M. Hare and Peter Singer, the consequentialist tradition centers welfare and the prevention of suffering. Bentham's commitment that "each is to count for one and none for more than one" is a foundational expression of equality. Mill's *On Liberty* defends free expression precisely on truth-tracking grounds (the marketplace of ideas argument) and on grounds of informed citizenship. #### Virtue ethics Aristotle's *Nicomachean Ethics* identifies the virtues, including justice, truthfulness, friendliness, and the practical wisdom (*phronesis*) that integrates them. The contemporary revival — Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958), MacIntyre's *After Virtue* (1981), Hursthouse's *On Virtue Ethics* (1999) — reframes ethics around character and social practice. The virtues most central to the floor are honesty, justice, and what Aristotle called *megalopsychia* (broadly, integrity in respecting persons). #### Care ethics Carol Gilligan's *In a Different Voice* (1982), Nel Noddings's *Caring* (1984), Joan Tronto's *Moral Boundaries* (1993), and Virginia Held's *The Ethics of Care* (2006) emphasize relationships, responsibility, attention to particular others, and the moral significance of dependency. Care ethics is sometimes positioned as a critique of justice-based ethics, but the more sophisticated formulations (Held, Tronto) insist on its complementarity: care without justice is parochial; justice without care is bloodless. Both are necessary to articulate dignity. #### Contractualism and Rawlsian political liberalism Rawls's *A Theory of Justice* (1971) derives principles of justice from a hypothetical original position behind a veil of ignorance, generating equal basic liberties and a difference principle on inequalities. *Political Liberalism* (1993) introduces the idea of an "overlapping consensus" among reasonable comprehensive doctrines on a freestanding political conception of justice. Scanlon's *What We Owe to Each Other* (1998) grounds morality in the idea of principles "that no one could reasonably reject" — a formal expression of justifiability to all affected. These contractualist frameworks are the most explicit Western articulations of the *floor concept itself*: a moral content that can be affirmed from within multiple worldviews. ### 3.2 Non-Western philosophical traditions #### Confucian ethics The Confucian tradition centers *ren* (仁, "humaneness," "benevolence"), often described by Confucius simply as *ai* (love) for others — but a love that is realized through proper relational conduct (*li*, ritual propriety) and refined through self-cultivation. The relational self of Confucian anthropology is not an autonomous monad but a person constituted through familial, social, and political relationships. Mencius held that the four "germinations" of moral feeling — commiseration, shame, deference, sense of right and wrong — are universal endowments. Xunzi added that ritual and education are necessary to cultivate them. Tu Weiming and the New Confucians (Mou Zongsan, Liu Shu-hsien) have explicitly argued that Confucian *ren* is compatible with, and in some ways anticipates, contemporary articulations of human dignity. Peng-chun Chang drew on this tradition in the UDHR drafting; the Chinese-tradition convergence on the floor's first value is not retroactive interpretation but documented design. #### Buddhist ethics The Four Brahmavihāras — *mettā* (loving-kindness), *karuṇā* (compassion), *muditā* (sympathetic joy), *upekkhā* (equanimity) — are the cornerstones of Buddhist moral psychology. The Eightfold Path includes *samma vaca* (Right Speech, with explicit injunctions against lying, divisive speech, harsh speech, and idle chatter) and *samma kammanta* (Right Action). The First Precept (*ahiṃsā*, non-harming) protects life. The universality of *dukkha* (suffering) provides a starting point that does not depend on any culturally local theology. Engaged Buddhism (Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, Sulak Sivaraksa) has explicitly tied these to human rights articulation. #### Ubuntu philosophy The Southern African ethical tradition expressed in the Nguni Bantu maxim *umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu* — "a person is a person through other persons" — articulates dignity through relationship. Mogobe Ramose (*African Philosophy through Ubuntu*, 1999), Desmond Tutu (*No Future Without Forgiveness*, 1999), Augustine Shutte, and the philosophical work of Thaddeus Metz (especially "Toward an African Moral Theory," *Journal of Political Philosophy* 15(3): 321–341, 2007) develop ubuntu as a substantive moral theory grounded in communal harmony. Metz's formulation — that an action is right insofar as it promotes friendly relationships and avoids antagonistic ones — is deliberately offered as Africa's distinctive contribution to global ethics, parallel to but independent of Kantian or utilitarian frameworks. The convergence on dignity-through-relationship is genuine; the relational grounding is the African distinctive. #### Islamic philosophical ethics The classical Arabic philosophers — al-Farabi (d. 950), Ibn Sina/Avicenna (d. 1037), and Ibn Rushd/Averroes (d. 1198) — developed eudaimonist ethical frameworks that integrated Aristotelian virtue ethics with Islamic theology and Neoplatonic metaphysics. Al-Farabi's *Mabādi' ārā' ahl al-madīna al-fāḍila* (*Principles of the Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City*) articulates a politics aimed at human happiness through virtue. Averroes's *Faṣl al-maqāl* (*Decisive Treatise*) defends the compatibility of philosophy and revelation. The classical doctrine of *karāmah* (dignity), grounded in Qur'ān 17:70 ("We have honored the children of Adam"), and the *maqāṣid al-sharī'a* (objectives of Islamic law — preservation of religion, life, intellect, lineage, and property; with later additions of dignity and freedom by al-Qaradawi and others) provide an indigenous Islamic vocabulary for the floor's first value. Contemporary thinkers such as Mohammed Arkoun, Khaled Abou El Fadl, Abdolkarim Soroush, and Tariq Ramadan have explicitly extended this framework to dialogue with international human rights. #### Indigenous and First Nations philosophical traditions The Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace, codified before sustained European contact (estimated 1142–1500 CE), articulates the Seventh Generation Principle: decisions should serve the well-being of seven generations forward. Vine Deloria Jr.'s *God Is Red* (1973) and *The Metaphysics of Modern Existence* (1979), along with the work of Daniel Wildcat, John Borrows (*Drawing Out Law*, 2010), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Glen Coulthard, articulate Indigenous philosophical frameworks centered on relational accountability, land-based knowledge, and intergenerational responsibility. These frameworks converge with the floor's values at the level of dignity, accountability, and informed deliberation, while contributing distinctive emphases — the moral standing of land and non-human beings, the time-horizon of seven generations — that the floor neither requires nor excludes. ### 3.3 Convergence at the floor's level of abstraction The five floor values, stated abstractly, do not require commitment to Kant against Aristotle, to Rawls against Mencius, to Mill against Mozi, or to any single metaphysical foundation. They identify the *practical conclusions* on which these traditions converge when they are stated at the level at which the floor is stated. --- ## Section 4 — Religious and Wisdom Traditions The argument here is the same as Section 3's, applied to religious rather than philosophical traditions. The point is not that religions agree on metaphysics — they manifestly do not — but that they converge, at the level at which the floor is stated, on the substantive normative commitments. | Tradition | Convergent expressions of floor values | |---|---| | **Judaism** | *B'tzelem Elohim* (every human in the image of God, Genesis 1:27); Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5 ("anyone who saves a single life, Scripture credits him as if he had saved an entire world"); *pikuach nefesh* (saving life overrides almost all other commandments); the prophetic justice tradition of Amos ("let justice roll down like waters," 5:24), Isaiah ("seek justice, defend the oppressed," 1:17), and Micah ("do justice, love mercy, walk humbly," 6:8); *tikkun olam* (repair of the world); the Decalogue's prohibition on bearing false witness | | **Christianity** | *Imago Dei* (the image-of-God doctrine, shared with Judaism); the great commandment of love of neighbor; the *agapē* tradition; the Sermon on the Mount; the social gospel (Walter Rauschenbusch, *A Theology for the Social Gospel*, 1917); Catholic Social Teaching from Leo XIII's *Rerum Novarum* (1891) through John XXIII's *Pacem in Terris* (1963), which was the first papal encyclical to enumerate human rights, through Francis's *Fratelli Tutti* (2020) on universal fraternity; liberation theology (Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff) on the "preferential option for the poor" | | **Islam** | *'Adl* (justice) — repeatedly enjoined in the Qur'ān (e.g., 4:135, 5:8); *karāmah* (dignity, 17:70); *iḥsān* (excellence in conduct); the *maqāṣid al-sharī'a*; Prophetic traditions on truthfulness (*sidq*) and the prohibition of *kidhb* (lying); the Constitution of Medina as an early articulation of multi-religious civic accountability | | **Hinduism** | *Dharma* (the moral order); *ahiṃsā* (non-violence); *satya* (truth) — twin pillars of Gandhi's reading; the Upanishadic *tat tvam asi* ("that thou art") grounding equality in the metaphysics of Atman; Manu's "where women are honored, the gods rejoice" (problematic in context but cited in modern reform) | | **Buddhism** | The Brahmavihāras and the Eightfold Path (above); the precepts; the bodhisattva vow; the dignity-grounding doctrine of universal Buddha-nature in Mahāyāna | | **Sikhism** | *Ik Onkar* (one universal Creator); *seva* (selfless service); the radical equality of *langar* (the communal meal where all sit and eat as equals regardless of caste, gender, religion, or status, instituted by Guru Nanak around 1500 CE); the practice of common surnames Singh and Kaur to dissolve caste markers | | **Jainism** | *Ahiṃsā* in its most demanding form; *satya* (truth); *aparigraha* (non-possessiveness); *anekāntavāda* (the doctrine of the multiplicity of viewpoints, an indigenous Jain epistemic humility that resonates with informed deliberation) | | **Bahá'í Faith** | The unity of humanity; equality of women and men; the elimination of racial and religious prejudice; the principle of the independent investigation of truth | | **Indigenous and Earth-based traditions** | Relational accountability; intergenerational responsibility (the Seventh Generation Principle); the moral standing of land; reciprocity with the more-than-human world | These traditions are not interchangeable, and several of them have significant internal disagreement about whether and how to operationalize these commitments. But the *presence* of the floor's commitments in each tradition's authoritative texts and authoritative interpretive lineages is well-attested. --- ## Section 5 — Journalism-Specific Articulations The standards tradition of journalism articulates the floor values in operational terms tailored to the press's social function. Convergence across major journalism codes is striking. ### 5.1 SPJ Code of Ethics The Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics, last revised at the 2014 SPJ National Convention (), is structured around four principles: | SPJ Principle | Floor value(s) operationalized | |---|---| | Seek Truth and Report It | Truthfulness | | Minimize Harm ("treat sources, subjects, colleagues, and members of the public as human beings deserving of respect") | Human life and dignity | | Act Independently ("the highest and primary obligation of ethical journalism is to serve the public") | Accountability of power; informed citizenship | | Be Accountable and Transparent | Equality (applying journalists' own standards to themselves); accountability of power | The code's preamble explicitly declares that "public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy" — a statement that fuses the truthfulness, accountability, and informed-citizenship values into a single editorial commitment. ### 5.2 Kovach and Rosenstiel — *The Elements of Journalism* Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel's *The Elements of Journalism* (first edition 2001; third edition 2014; revised again 2021), drawn from years of focus groups conducted by the Committee of Concerned Journalists, articulates ten elements: 1. Journalism's first obligation is to the truth. 2. Its first loyalty is to citizens. 3. Its essence is a discipline of verification. 4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover. 5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power. 6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise. 7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant. 8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional. 9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience. 10. Citizens, too, have rights and responsibilities when it comes to the news. Element 1 maps to truthfulness; element 2 to informed citizenship; elements 4 and 5 to accountability of power; element 3 (verification) is the operational discipline by which truth-seeking is realized. ### 5.3 Reuters Trust Principles Originally drafted in 1941 in the midst of the Second World War to preserve Reuters from capture by any single interest, the Trust Principles () commit Reuters to maintaining "integrity, independence and freedom from bias." When Reuters merged with Thomson in 2008, the Reuters Founders Share Company was retained as a structural guarantee. The principles articulate the floor's third (accountability) and fourth (equality of treatment) values in operational terms. ### 5.4 BBC Editorial Guidelines The BBC's Editorial Guidelines (most recent revision 2024) center on accuracy, impartiality, and fairness. The duty of due impartiality is unusual in its explicit textual codification (Section 4) and is structurally reinforced by the BBC's public-corporation status. Accuracy is the BBC's "first priority" in news. ### 5.5 IFJ Global Charter of Ethics for Journalists The International Federation of Journalists' Global Charter of Ethics for Journalists, adopted at the 30th IFJ World Congress in Tunis on 12 June 2019 (an updating of the 1954 Bordeaux Declaration), commits journalists worldwide to respect for facts, the rights of the public to truth, fairness, the protection of sources, and the avoidance of incitement to discrimination. ### 5.6 The Hutchins Commission and social responsibility theory The 1947 Commission on Freedom of the Press, chaired by Robert Maynard Hutchins, produced *A Free and Responsible Press* (University of Chicago Press, 1947) — the founding document of social-responsibility theory in journalism. Its five recommendations to the press were: 1. Provide a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day's events in a context which gives them meaning. 2. Serve as a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism. 3. Project a representative picture of the constituent groups in society. 4. Be responsible for the presentation and clarification of the goals and values of society. 5. Provide full access to the day's intelligence. The commission's conceptual move — from an absolute liberty of the press to a press whose liberty is grounded in its social function — directly tracks the floor's premise that journalism's authority comes from serving values prior to and broader than the press itself. ### 5.7 The Lippmann–Dewey debate Walter Lippmann's *Public Opinion* (1922) and *The Phantom Public* (1925), together with John Dewey's response in *The Public and Its Problems* (1927), set the terms of the modern debate about the press's role in democracy. Lippmann argued that the modern public is too complex, distracted, and ill-informed to govern directly, and that the press's role is to translate elite expertise into civic intelligibility. Dewey argued that the public can in fact be constituted, but only through the cultivation of communicative practices and educational institutions that make intelligent participation possible. The contemporary articulation in Habermas's theory of the public sphere (*Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit*, 1962; English translation 1989) extends the Dewey line. The floor's fifth value — informed citizenship — is the practical commitment that Dewey insisted is achievable and Habermas insists is institutionally precarious. --- ## Section 6 — Philosophical Literature on Minimal Moral Consensus ### 6.1 Rawls's overlapping consensus The single most developed philosophical articulation of what the floor is doing — naming a content that can be affirmed from within multiple worldviews — is Rawls's "overlapping consensus" in *Political Liberalism* (1993, esp. Lecture IV). On Rawls's view, the central problem of liberal democracies is the persistence of "reasonable pluralism": the fact that the free exercise of human reason produces a permanent diversity of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines (religious, philosophical, and moral). Stability cannot rest on any one of these. It must rest on a "freestanding" political conception — a module that can be inserted into many comprehensive doctrines and be affirmed from within each, for that doctrine's own reasons. The overlapping consensus is the result. Rawls is explicit that overlapping consensus is *not* a mere modus vivendi (a strategic compromise). It is a moral conception, supported by moral reasoning, even though the *grounds* of support differ across doctrines. The floor as articulated in this appendix is in this sense a Rawlsian object. The principal critics include: - **Habermas**, who argued in *The Inclusion of the Other* (1996, esp. "Reasonable versus True") that Rawls's distinction between political and comprehensive justification understates the rational continuity of moral discourse and overestimates the privacy of comprehensive doctrines. - **Communitarians** (Sandel, MacIntyre, Charles Taylor) who argued that the freestanding module is itself a particular comprehensive view (autonomous-liberal individualism) that pretends to neutrality. - **Republicans and feminists** who argued that the line between political and comprehensive understates the role of background institutions and gendered structures. These critiques sharpen the floor's articulation rather than dissolving it. The floor takes no position on whether overlapping consensus is *fully* freestanding (probably it is not), but only on the more modest empirical claim that broad convergence at the floor's level of abstraction is documented in Sections 1–4. ### 6.2 Universalism, relativism, and moral realism Mainstream contemporary metaethics is far less hospitable to global moral relativism than popular discourse suggests. Surveys of professional philosophers (the PhilPapers Surveys of 2009 and 2020) show roughly 60% endorsement of moral realism over anti-realism, and a similarly large majority rejection of strong cultural relativism. The leading positions are some form of moral realism (naturalist or non-naturalist), constructivism (Kantian or Humean), and various forms of expressivism with quasi-realist commitments. Error theory (Mackie, *Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong*, 1977) is the most prominent purely anti-realist position and remains a minority view. This does not settle the floor's philosophical status. It does mean that the floor is consistent with positions held by a strong majority of academic moral philosophers. ### 6.3 Human-rights universalism in philosophy Several major philosophical defenses of human-rights universalism have appeared since 2000: - **James Griffin**, *On Human Rights* (Oxford, 2008) — grounds human rights in the protection of "personhood" (autonomy, liberty, and minimum welfare), with a top-down filter that excludes some items currently on the UN list as not genuinely human rights. - **Charles Beitz**, *The Idea of Human Rights* (Oxford, 2009) — argues for a "practical" conception: human rights are best understood through the function they perform in contemporary international practice as triggers for international concern. - **Allen Buchanan**, *The Heart of Human Rights* (Oxford, 2013) — argues that international legal human rights are morally justified legal rights and require no single foundationalist ground. - **Martha Nussbaum**'s capabilities approach, articulated in *Women and Human Development* (Cambridge, 2000), *Frontiers of Justice* (Harvard, 2006), and *Creating Capabilities* (Harvard, 2011) — defends a list of ten "central capabilities" (life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses-imagination-thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, other species, play, control over one's environment) that she argues to have "broad cross-cultural resonance" and to follow from human dignity. These positions disagree with each other, but they converge on the rejection of strong relativism and on the existence of a substantive cross-cultural floor. ### 6.4 Empirical research on cross-cultural moral consensus In addition to Schwartz, Inglehart, and Haidt (Section 2), the cognitive-science literature includes: - **Marc Hauser**'s *Moral Minds* (Harper, 2006) on a putative universal "moral grammar" analogous to Chomsky's universal grammar, with cross-cultural data from the online Moral Sense Test. (Hauser's specific institutional case at Harvard subsequently raised methodological questions, but the underlying cross-cultural patterns have been replicated by Mikhail and others.) - **Joseph Henrich**, **Steven Heine**, and **Ara Norenzayan**'s "The Weirdest People in the World?" (*Behavioral and Brain Sciences* 33: 61–135, 2010), and Henrich's *The WEIRDest People in the World* (FSG, 2020), demonstrating that Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic populations are unrepresentative of humanity on many psychological dimensions. The WEIRD critique is *not* a relativist refutation of universalism; it is a methodological warning that what we measured in undergraduates may not generalize. Subsequent cross-cultural work (Atari et al. 2020 on MFT, the Moral Universals study, the cooperative-cross-cultural work of Curry, Mullins & Whitehouse 2019 in *Current Anthropology* identifying seven moral rules treated as moral in essentially every culture sampled) has supported floor-level universals while documenting variation in elaboration. ### 6.5 Critiques The floor must take seriously several lines of critique: **Postmodern critiques.** Lyotard's *La Condition postmoderne* (1979) is skeptical of all "grand narratives" claiming universality. Foucault's analyses of power/knowledge (*Discipline and Punish*, 1975; *History of Sexuality* vol. 1, 1976) argue that purportedly universal humanist categories are themselves products of particular regimes of power. The floor responds that pointing to power's role in the production of categories does not show those categories are wrong; the empirical convergence in Sections 1–4 is data that any account of power must explain. **Decolonial critiques.** Aníbal Quijano on the "coloniality of power" (1992; 2000), Walter Mignolo on the "geopolitics of knowledge" (*The Darker Side of Western Modernity*, 2011), and Enrique Dussel on the "ethics of liberation" press the case that universalist discourse has historically masked European particularity. The floor takes this critique seriously and responds by *including* non-Western philosophical and religious traditions as independent sources of convergence (Sections 3.2 and 4) rather than as confirmations of an already-Western product. Where the floor is articulable only by smuggling in Western particulars, it should be revised; where it survives explicit testing against Confucian, ubuntu, Islamic, Indigenous, and other articulations, it survives. **The Asian Values debate.** From the early 1990s through the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, and Singaporean diplomats Kishore Mahbubani and Bilahari Kausikan argued that liberal-democratic human rights were inappropriate Western imports for Asia, displacing values of community, deference, hard work, and order. The 1993 Bangkok Declaration of Asian states pressed regional particularity into the run-up to the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights. Amartya Sen's response (*Human Rights and Asian Values*, Carnegie Council, 1997; expanded in *The Argumentative Indian*, 2005, and *The Idea of Justice*, 2009) is decisive at the floor's level of abstraction: there is no single set of "Asian values," Asian intellectual traditions are at least as internally plural as European ones, and the strands of those traditions affirming dignity, rule of law, and public reasoning are extensive (Sen documents Ashoka, Akbar, the Charvaka tradition, and much more). Kim Dae-jung's "Is Culture Destiny?" (*Foreign Affairs* 73(6), 1994) made the same case from a Korean democratic perspective. Jack Donnelly's *Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice* (Cornell, 3rd ed. 2013) systematically argues that the Asian Values argument is generally a state-protective rhetoric disconnected from the actual normative resources of the cultures invoked. **The American Anthropological Association statements.** The 1947 AAA Statement on Human Rights, drafted principally by Melville Herskovits (*American Anthropologist* 49: 539–543, 1947), warned against a universal declaration that would override cultural particularity. The 1999 AAA Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights largely reversed course, affirming that anthropologists "have a duty" to defend human rights as enlarged by anthropological understanding. The 2020 AAA statement continues this trajectory. Karen Engle's "From Skepticism to Embrace" (*Human Rights Quarterly* 23(3): 536–559, 2001) provides a careful reading: the 1999 statement was less a "complete turnaround" than a working out of tensions present in the 1947 document. The floor's posture is closer to the 1999/2020 AAA position than to the 1947 one, but it acknowledges that the 1947 worry — about universalist declarations overriding genuine cultural particularity — is a continuing constraint on how the floor is operationalized, not a refutation of the floor itself. --- ## Section 7 — Each Floor Value, Summarized This section consolidates the lineage of each floor value, drawing across Sections 1–6. ### 7.1 Human life and dignity The floor's first value is the inviolability and equal worth of the human person. - **Legal** — UDHR Preamble ("inherent dignity"); UDHR Art. 1 (born free and equal in dignity and rights); UDHR Art. 3 (right to life, liberty, and security of person); UDHR Art. 5 (no torture); ICCPR Arts. 6, 7; regional instruments uniformly. - **Empirical** — Schwartz universalism-concern and benevolence; the harm/care moral foundation in Haidt; the Yale infant studies on early-emerging concern about helpers vs. hinderers. - **Philosophical** — Kant's Formula of Humanity (persons as ends in themselves; *Würde* not *Preis*); utilitarian commitment that each counts for one; Aristotle's account of human flourishing; Rawls's primacy of equal basic liberties; Nussbaum's capabilities approach grounded explicitly in human dignity. - **Non-Western philosophical** — Confucian *ren* and the relational personhood of Tu Weiming; Buddhist *karuṇā* and *ahiṃsā*; ubuntu's dignity-through-relationship; Islamic *karāmah*; Indigenous relational accountability. - **Religious** — *imago Dei*; *b'tzelem Elohim*; Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5 (each life as a world); Qur'ān 17:70 (children of Adam honored); the Buddha-nature doctrine; the Sikh equality of all souls before *Ik Onkar*. - **Journalism** — SPJ "Minimize Harm" pillar; the broad consensus that journalists must treat sources and subjects as deserving of respect, weigh harm against newsworthiness, and exercise heightened sensitivity with vulnerable populations. ### 7.2 Truthfulness The floor's second value is fidelity to fact in inquiry and communication, and the protection of the conditions of inquiry. - **Legal** — UDHR Art. 19 and ICCPR Art. 19 (freedom of opinion and expression; right to seek, receive, and impart information); the broader free-expression jurisprudence of regional courts. - **Empirical** — Schwartz benevolence-dependability and the honesty/integrity construct; cross-cultural research showing that truth-telling as a moral norm is among the most consistently endorsed across societies (Curry, Mullins & Whitehouse 2019). - **Philosophical** — Kant's near-absolute prohibition on lying; Mill's truth-tracking argument for free expression in *On Liberty*; Sidgwick on veracity as a self-evident axiom; the contemporary epistemology-of-testimony literature (Coady, Lackey). - **Non-Western** — Confucian *cheng* (sincerity); the Buddhist Right Speech of the Eightfold Path; Hindu *satya* (especially in Gandhi's reading: "truth is God"); Jain *satya* paired with *anekāntavāda*. - **Religious** — the Decalogue's prohibition on bearing false witness; *sidq* in Islamic ethics; *satya* in Hindu and Jain thought; the Bahá'í principle of independent investigation of truth. - **Journalism** — SPJ "Seek Truth and Report It"; Kovach and Rosenstiel's first element ("Journalism's first obligation is to the truth"); Reuters's accuracy commitment; BBC's accuracy as first priority; Hutchins Commission's first recommendation. ### 7.3 Accountability of power The floor's third value is the requirement that those who exercise power be subject to constraint, scrutiny, and answerability. - **Legal** — UDHR Arts. 7–10 (equality before the law, effective remedy, no arbitrary arrest, fair trial); UDHR Art. 21 (will of the people as basis of authority); ICCPR Arts. 14, 25; the entire structure of regional human-rights courts. - **Empirical** — Schwartz universalism-concern operationalized into political concern; Inglehart-Welzel finding that self-expression values, including demand for political voice, expand with security. - **Political-philosophical** — Locke's *Two Treatises of Government* (1689) on government's accountability to the consent of the governed; Madison's *Federalist* (especially No. 51, "if men were angels"); Montesquieu on separation of powers; Mill on representative government; the contemporary republican theory of Pettit (*Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government*, 1997; *On the People's Terms*, 2012) and Quentin Skinner (*Liberty before Liberalism*, 1998) on freedom as non-domination, requiring institutional constraints on arbitrary power. - **Non-Western** — the Confucian Mandate of Heaven (rulers lose legitimacy through misrule, articulated in Mencius); the Islamic tradition of *shura* (consultation); the Buddhist framework of righteous rulership (*Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta*); ubuntu's communal accountability of leadership; Haudenosaunee constitutional checks on chiefs. - **Religious** — the prophetic tradition's confrontation of kings (Nathan and David, Elijah and Ahab, Amos against Israel's elites); Jesus' challenges to political and religious authority; the Islamic injunction to "command the right and forbid the wrong" (*amr bi'l-ma'rūf*); Catholic Social Teaching's demand that political authority serve the common good (*Pacem in Terris*). - **Journalism** — SPJ "Act Independently" and the watchdog tradition; Kovach and Rosenstiel's elements 4 (independence) and 5 (independent monitor of power); Reuters's structural independence guarantees. ### 7.4 Equality and fairness The floor's fourth value is the equal moral standing of persons and the requirement that institutions treat them with equal concern. - **Legal** — UDHR Arts. 1, 2, 7; ICCPR Arts. 2, 3, 14, 26; ICESCR Art. 3; regional non-discrimination jurisprudence. - **Empirical** — Schwartz universalism (especially the equality and social-justice items); the fairness/cheating moral foundation and (since Atari et al. 2023) the equality foundation; Haidt's finding that fairness-as-equality is among the most universally weighted moral concerns. - **Philosophical** — Rawls's two principles, especially the difference principle (*A Theory of Justice* §13); Dworkin's *Sovereign Virtue* (2000) on equality of resources and equal concern; Sen's capability approach as a metric of equality robust to differences in conversion factors (*Inequality Reexamined*, 1992; *The Idea of Justice*, 2009); G. A. Cohen on luck egalitarianism; Anderson on relational equality. - **Non-Western** — Mozi's *jian'ai* (universal love, against Confucian graded love) as an early egalitarian formulation; the Buddhist universal *karma* and Buddha-nature; Sikh radical equality (Ik Onkar, langar, common surnames); ubuntu's equal dignity through relationship. - **Religious** — *b'tzelem Elohim* applied to all (Genesis 1:27 makes no caveats); Galatians 3:28 ("neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female"); the Qur'ānic equality verses (49:13: "we have created you... that you may know one another. Indeed, the noblest of you in the sight of God is the most righteous"); Sikh egalitarianism; the Bahá'í equality of women and men. - **Journalism** — symmetric scrutiny: the commitment to apply the same standards to all subjects regardless of political alignment, social standing, or commercial relationship to the news organization. SPJ's directive to "be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable" applies to all power. ### 7.5 Informed citizenship The floor's fifth value is the practical commitment that ordinary citizens are competent to participate in self-government and that the conditions of that competence must be protected. - **Legal** — UDHR Arts. 19, 21, 26; ICCPR Arts. 19, 25. - **Empirical** — Inglehart-Welzel's documentation of the rising demand for political participation as societies move toward self-expression; comparative data on the correlation between press freedom, education, and democratic stability. - **Political-philosophical** — Mill, *On Liberty* (1859), on the marketplace of ideas as the conditions for citizens' rational self-direction; Dewey, *The Public and Its Problems* (1927), defending the capacity of an organized public; Habermas, *Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit* (1962) and *Between Facts and Norms* (1992), on the public sphere as the medium through which democratic legitimacy is generated; Iris Marion Young on inclusive deliberation. - **Religious / cultural literacy traditions** — the Reformation principle of direct lay access to scripture (the priesthood of all believers, Tyndale's Bible, the cultural revolution of vernacular literacy); the Jewish literacy tradition (universal male literacy by the medieval period and broad textual study); the Islamic *'ilm* tradition (the seeking of knowledge as religious obligation: "seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave" — a saying ascribed to the Prophet); Confucian self-cultivation through study (*xue*). - **Journalism** — SPJ Preamble ("public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy"); Kovach and Rosenstiel's element 2 ("first loyalty is to citizens"); the entire Hutchins Commission framework on the press's social responsibility for public intelligibility. --- ## Section 8 — The Floor's Defensibility against Challenge ### 8.1 The relativist challenge *Challenge*: Values are culturally constructed; there is no universal moral floor. *Response*: The publication does not require strong moral realism. It requires only the empirical claim that broad and convergent sources, drawn from independent legal, psychological, philosophical, religious, and professional traditions, articulate something recognizable as the floor when stated at the floor's level of abstraction. Sections 1–4 of this appendix are the evidence for that empirical claim. The relativist may continue to deny that such convergence settles any deep metaethical question; the floor does not need it to. What the floor needs is that the relativist cannot dismiss it as the projection of a single culture, and the convergence documented here makes such dismissal unsustainable. ### 8.2 The Western-imperialism challenge *Challenge*: The floor is Western values dressed up as universal; it bears the marks of European Enlightenment particularity even when proposed in nominally universal language. *Response*: The challenge has historical force and is conceded in part. Enlightenment political philosophy was unusually influential in the articulation of *human rights* as a legal and rhetorical form, and the appendix says so explicitly (the UDHR's Cassin-Humphrey draft was Code-Napoléon-influenced; Maritain was Catholic-Thomist; Rawls is recognizably in a Kantian lineage). But the *substantive normative content* at the floor's level of abstraction is not unique to Western traditions. Section 3.2 documents the independent articulation of dignity through relationship in Confucian *ren*, ubuntu, and Indigenous relational accountability; Section 4 documents the convergence of religious traditions; Section 1.1 documents that Chang, Malik, Mehta, Romulo, Santa Cruz, and others were not transmission belts for a Western product but co-authors who reshaped the document. Where the floor's articulation has carried Western particulars, those have been identified and adjusted. The remaining content is what survives that test. ### 8.3 The political-bias challenge *Challenge*: The floor advantages one political tradition (typically said to be liberalism, or sometimes conservatism, depending on the critic). *Response*: The floor is pre-political at the level of abstraction at which it is stated. Each contemporary political tradition aligns with parts of it, partially aligns with others, and rejects none of them at the floor's level of abstraction. A conservative position emphasizing tradition, family, and order is fully consistent with human life and dignity, truthfulness, accountability of power (a long conservative theme, from Edmund Burke through Friedrich Hayek), equality before the law, and informed citizenship. A progressive position emphasizing equity, voice, and structural change is similarly consistent. A libertarian position is consistent. A communitarian position is consistent. What none of these positions can do is reject the floor *and* remain coherent as a political tradition operating in a constitutional democracy. The floor itself takes no position on the more contested political questions — distribution, the size of the state, the structure of the family, the regulation of speech beyond the floor of truthfulness, immigration policy. Those are matters for political contestation. The floor is the field on which contestation happens. ### 8.4 The contestability challenge *Challenge*: Any articulation of values is contestable. The floor is no exception. *Response*: Conceded, and welcomed. The floor is not claimed as absolute truth or as immune to revision. It is articulated as the operating assumption of the publication, openly stated and openly debatable. What the publication owes its readers is not an undisputable foundation — there are none in moral and political philosophy — but transparency about the floor it is operating from, the sources from which that floor is derived, and the level of abstraction at which it is asserted. This appendix is that transparency. Readers who reject the floor are free to argue against it on the same publicly-available evidence presented here. That is the only kind of justification a democratic publication can responsibly offer. --- ## Bibliography ### Primary international legal instruments - United Nations General Assembly. *Universal Declaration of Human Rights*. UN GA Res. 217 A (III), 10 December 1948. - United Nations General Assembly. *International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights*. Adopted 16 December 1966; in force 23 March 1976. - United Nations General Assembly. *International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights*. Adopted 16 December 1966; in force 3 January 1976. - Council of Europe. *European Convention on Human Rights*. Rome, 4 November 1950. - Organization of American States. *American Convention on Human Rights ("Pact of San José")*. San José, 22 November 1969. - Organization of African Unity. *African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights ("Banjul Charter")*. Nairobi, 27 June 1981. - League of Arab States. *Arab Charter on Human Rights*. Tunis, 22 May 2004 (revised). - Association of Southeast Asian Nations. *ASEAN Human Rights Declaration*. Phnom Penh, 18 November 2012. ### UDHR drafting history - Glendon, Mary Ann. *A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights*. New York: Random House, 2001. - Morsink, Johannes. *The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent*. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. - Goodale, Mark. *Letters to the Contrary: A Curated History of the UNESCO Human Rights Survey*. 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London: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2008. - Ramadan, Tariq. *Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation*. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. - Deloria, Vine, Jr. *God Is Red: A Native View of Religion*. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 30th anniv. ed. 2003. - Borrows, John. *Drawing Out Law: A Spirit's Guide*. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. ### Religious traditions - The Hebrew Bible / Tanakh. Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5. - The New Testament. - The Qur'ān (translations: M. A. S. Abdel Haleem, Oxford World's Classics, 2004). - Pope Leo XIII. *Rerum Novarum* (encyclical). 1891. - Pope John XXIII. *Pacem in Terris* (encyclical). 1963. - Pope Francis. *Fratelli Tutti* (encyclical). 2020. - Gutiérrez, Gustavo. *A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation*. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, rev. ed. 1988. - Sacks, Jonathan. *To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility*. London: Continuum, 2005. - Ñāṇamoli, Bhikkhu, and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans. *The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (Majjhima Nikāya)*. Boston: Wisdom, 1995. - Singh, Pashaura, and Louis E. Fenech, eds. *The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies*. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. - Bahá'u'lláh. *The Hidden Words*. Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1985. ### Journalism - Society of Professional Journalists. *SPJ Code of Ethics*. Revised 2014. - Kovach, Bill, and Tom Rosenstiel. *The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect*. New York: Crown, 1st ed. 2001; 4th ed. 2021. - Reuters. *Trust Principles*. - Reuters. *Handbook of Journalism Standards and Values*. - BBC. *Editorial Guidelines*. - International Federation of Journalists. *Global Charter of Ethics for Journalists*. Tunis, 12 June 2019. - Commission on Freedom of the Press (Hutchins Commission). *A Free and Responsible Press*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947. - Lippmann, Walter. *Public Opinion*. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922. - Lippmann, Walter. *The Phantom Public*. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925. - Dewey, John. *The Public and Its Problems*. New York: Holt, 1927. - Habermas, Jürgen. *The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere*. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. (German original 1962.) ### Philosophical literature on minimal moral consensus - Griffin, James. *On Human Rights*. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. - Beitz, Charles R. *The Idea of Human Rights*. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. - Buchanan, Allen. *The Heart of Human Rights*. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. - Nussbaum, Martha C. *Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. - Nussbaum, Martha C. *Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. - Nussbaum, Martha C. *Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. - Sen, Amartya. *The Idea of Justice*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. - Sen, Amartya. *Human Rights and Asian Values*. Sixteenth Morgenthau Memorial Lecture on Ethics & Foreign Policy. New York: Carnegie Council, 1997. - Donnelly, Jack. *Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice*. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 3rd ed. 2013. - Habermas, Jürgen. *The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory*. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. - Hauser, Marc D. *Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong*. New York: Harper, 2006. ### Critiques and counter-positions - Lyotard, Jean-François. *The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge*. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. (French original 1979.) - Foucault, Michel. *Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison*. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1977. - Quijano, Aníbal. "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America." *Nepantla: Views from South* 1(3): 533–580, 2000. - Mignolo, Walter D. *The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options*. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. - Dussel, Enrique. *Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion*. Trans. Eduardo Mendieta et al. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. - Bell, Daniel A. *East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia*. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. - Kausikan, Bilahari. "Asia's Different Standard." *Foreign Policy* 92: 24–41, 1993. - American Anthropological Association, Executive Board. "Statement on Human Rights." *American Anthropologist* 49(4): 539–543, 1947. - American Anthropological Association. *Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights*. Adopted by the membership, June 1999. - Engle, Karen. "From Skepticism to Embrace: Human Rights and the American Anthropological Association from 1947–1999." *Human Rights Quarterly* 23(3): 536–559, 2001. --- *End of Appendix B.*