Professor May Sim’s monograph, Defending Human Rights: Virtue-Oriented Lessons from Confucianism, seeks to defend human rights by appealing to resources that the Confucian virtues offer. Ever since the creation of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNUDHR) in the aftermath of World War II, human rights have been central to global diplomacy and political theory. Yet, the emergence and use of human rights talk on the international stage has not been without controversy. Sim acknowledges that since the inception of the UNUDHR, Western delegates, steeped in Enlightenment philosophy, and their East Asian counterparts, influenced by Confucian thinking and Asian values, clashed over the compatibility of Asian values and human rights, as well as the content of human rights. She claims that Western theorists hold that human rights must be founded on a sense of autonomy and individuality, while Eastern thinkers maintain that a conception of human rights must reflect Confucianism’s emphasis on the community and the citizen’s obligations to others. This debate has led many scholars to conclude that while the West supports the first-generation civil and political rights, the East only supports the second-generation economic, social, and cultural rights. However, Sim contends that Confucianism can offer a robust defense of not only the second-generation rights, but also the first-generation rights, due to its intrinsic reliance on the virtues of humaneness (ren), righteousness (yi), ritual propriety (li), and wisdom (zhi).. According to her, these virtues are the goals toward which human rights are the conditions for reaching them. Ultimately, Sim demonstrates how a Confucian conception of human rights can support both the first and second generation rights, and rectify numerous failings in Western accounts that presuppose individual autonomy.

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