Modern humanism is among the most significant intellectual achievements of Western civilization. It originates in Christian personalism, the Enlightenment, and liberal political theory, where the individual, autonomy, and personal rights are paramount. Yet by the end of the 20th century, and especially in the 21st, this paradigm increasingly produces the opposite of its intent: the defense not of the weak, but of the aggressive; not of victims, but of provocateurs. This is a perverted form of humanism — where the criminal, the protester, or the marginalized figure receives more protection from the state than the law-abiding citizen, his property, or his safety.
Origins
Modern human rights doctrine traces back to the declarations of the 18th century: the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and the works of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. These ideas gained renewed force after World War II, when the response to Nazism took the form of institutional mechanisms designed to protect the individual from state arbitrariness. This produced the European Convention on Human Rights (1950), the European Court of Human Rights, and the legal principles of non-refoulement1, due process2, the presumption of innocence, and universal jurisdiction3.
But institutions created to protect individuals from totalitarianism gradually shifted emphasis — from legal presumption to moral sentiment. Where law once functioned as procedure, it now operates as empathy. This is a fundamental shift.
The Ontology of Humanism as Vulnerability
Classical humanism conceived of the individual as an end in himself, endowed with reason and will. In postmodernity, the subject is recast as a carrier of vulnerability. The postmodern human is not an agent but a victim — demanding recognition, compensation, and protection from even the most abstract forms of “harm.”
This generates a critical substitution: the ethics of responsibility (in Weber’s terms4) is displaced by the ethics of compassion. In a framework where suffering is sacralized, the protester is, by default, closer to “moral truth” than the private citizen disturbed by the breakdown of order. Even an aggressive offender is interpreted as unloved, unintegrated, marginalized. He is given priority within a legal regime where punishment is nearly taboo, and the defense of property is treated with suspicion.
Examples
Self-defense and property protection
In the U.S., despite the Second Amendment and Stand Your Ground5 laws, thousands of individuals face prosecution for defending their lives or property. In Europe, the situation is often worse: in the U.K., a homeowner who stabs an intruder in his kitchen may receive a harsher sentence than the burglar himself.
Cases involving “excessive force in self-defense” across the EU, Canada, and Australia illustrate the pathological prioritization of the assailant’s rights.
Protests and the paralysis of public order
Hundreds of cases in the U.S. show businesses destroyed during protests (BLM, Occupy), with police instructed not to intervene for fear of being labeled racist or “aggressive.”
In Germany and France, courts have repeatedly prohibited the dispersal of unauthorized demonstrations — even when they disrupt hospitals, schools, or public transport.
Immigration policy
A refugee who crosses the border illegally often gains more rights to housing, medical care, and legal aid than a native citizen in distress.
The protective rhetoric paralyzes repatriation mechanisms and incentivizes further violations.
The Collapse of Symmetry
Classical legal logic is grounded in a balance between liberty and responsibility, between rights and obligations. Modern humanism disrupts this symmetry: it preserves rights while removing responsibility. This renders it toxic to the very concept of legal order. The refusal to differentiate between the lawful and the aggressive, between protest and extortion, between defense and attack, erodes the legitimacy of the state as a guarantor of order.
On the Inversion of Justice
To protect the criminal from the victim — rather than the other way around — is to abandon justice in favor of an abstract idea of “humanity.” This is not humanism but its caricature. A state more afraid to punish the guilty than to expose the innocent to harm forfeits its claim to the monopoly on violence.
In political philosophy, this is a form of liberal masochism, where guilt becomes the driving force behind institutional decisions. But guilt cannot serve as a foundation for law. Only fair distinction can: who is right, who is wrong; who defends, who attacks; who bears risk, who receives benefit.
Conclusion
Modern humanism, by erasing the boundary between moral and legal categories, reproduces injustice under the banner of compassion. It turns the legal system into a mechanism that rewards antisocial behavior, thereby undermining the foundational social contract. This is not progress but a relapse into archaism — where protection belongs to those who complain the loudest, not to those who are right. Humanism requires a limit. That limit is justice — not the one envisioned by Rawls. ■
Non-refoulement is a cornerstone of international humanitarian and refugee law. It prohibits the forced return of a person to a country where their life or freedom would be at risk.
Due process is a fundamental legal principle requiring the state to follow a fair, transparent, and legally established procedure when restricting an individual’s rights, freedoms, or property.
Universal jurisdiction holds that certain crimes are so grave that they violate the interests of all humanity. As such, any state has the right — and in some cases the obligation — to prosecute them.
“Politics as a Vocation” (1919) by Max Weber. Modern liberal institutions often operate according to the ethics of conviction: they aim to be morally “right” by defending the vulnerable, without regard for consequences such as rising crime, the erosion of legal order, or public frustration. By contrast, the classical ethics of responsibility demands that authorities weigh consequences — including the negative effects of excessive protection for aggressors or protesters — and make decisions based not on abstract virtue, but on actual utility and justice.
Stand Your Ground is a principle in U.S. law, enacted in several state statutes, that allows a person to use force — including lethal force — in self-defense without a duty to retreat, even if retreat is safely possible. The core idea: if you have a lawful right to be in a place, you may defend yourself there with force, without obligation to withdraw.