Ioanna Kuçuradi, who grounded human rights in the value of the human, dies at 89

Ioanna Kuçuradi, who died in Istanbul on 2 October 2026 at the age of 89, spent six decades defending a single unfashionable claim: that human rights are not a Western invention, a legal convention or the residue of political bargaining, but follow from what a human being is. She died two days short of her ninetieth birthday — she was born in the city on 4 October 1936, into a family of Greek descent — at the Maltepe University teaching hospital, as the Istanbul daily Diken and other Turkish outlets reported on the evening of her death. A memorial was to be held at Maltepe University before her burial at the Şişli Greek Orthodox Cemetery.

Outside Turkey she was known less for any one book than for an office and a position. In 1998 she became President of the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie (FISP), the body that has federated the world's philosophical societies since 1948 and convenes the World Congress of Philosophy; she was the first woman to hold the post in its history, having served as the federation's Secretary-General for the preceding decade. The same year UNESCO gave her a Chair in Philosophy and Human Rights. The position she defended in those offices is the reason an obituary for her belongs in a philosophy paper read in London or Delhi rather than only in Istanbul.

She disliked the biographical mode and kept the first person out of her sentences on principle, so it is fairer to her to begin with the argument. For most of the twentieth century the standing objection to human rights ran through cultural relativism: if rights are a product of a particular European history, why should any other tradition accept them? Kuçuradi thought the objection landed only because defenders of rights had conceded the wrong ground. Rights, she held, are derived neither from documents nor from cultures. They are derived from the value of the human being — and that, she insisted, is a matter of knowledge, not of preference.

A distinction most philosophy blurs#

Her whole position rests on a distinction that ordinary language and a good deal of philosophy run together: the difference between values and value judgments. In the account summarised by scholars of her work, value is "the distinguishing quality inherent in a thing and specific to its kind", whereas value judgments — good and bad, right and wrong, useful and harmful — are "qualifications determined by the moral environment". Value judgments are relative; they shift from one society and period to the next. The value of a thing is not relative in the same way, because it belongs to what that thing is.

Applied to persons, this yields her central term, the value of the human: the specific capacities that distinguish the human species — to know, to create art, to philosophise, to act from an understanding of what one is doing. Kuçuradi then separated three attitudes a person can take towards anything that comes before them. One can attribute value to it out of interest; one can apply a ready-made value judgment drawn from the going norms; or one can carry out a correct evaluation, seeing the thing in its own structure and in its relation to the value of the human. Her lifelong quarrel was with the second attitude standing in for the third. When ideologies, states and national cultures present their own value judgments as "values" and assess people by them, she argued, you have the conceptual source of the way rights get violated. It is a demanding doctrine, and it concedes little to the reader who wants ethics to deliver rules.

Ethics as knowledge, not morality#

From the value distinction she drew a second, which she systematised in her book Ethics: the gap between ethics and morality. Morality is the set of behavioural norms in force in a given society at a given time — the social form of value judgments, relative and changing. Ethics is not a longer or better list of such norms. It is the philosophical knowledge of the value of human actions: not a code that says what is good, but an inquiry into how the worth of an action can be known at all. The "ethical person", on this view, is not the one who applies the rules reliably but the one who can determine, in each singular case, what the situation requires.

Her ethics was Kantian, though filtered through the value theory she had absorbed from the phenomenological tradition. Commentators note the parallel between Kant's treatment of the human being as an end in itself and her own emphasis on human value, and she translated both the Critique of Practical Reason and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals into Turkish. Where she parted from the material value-ethics of Max Scheler was over hierarchy: rather than rank values on a fixed scale, she thought the relevant value had to be disclosed afresh in each concrete situation through correct evaluation. Her doctorate, completed in 1965, had worked on the problem of the human being in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and the encounter with Nietzsche's attack on the value of our values left a permanent mark. Nietzsche had argued that values are made by human beings; Kuçuradi took the challenge seriously and spent her career trying to show that something non-relative could survive it. Her two early studies grew out of the thesis, one on Schopenhauer's account of will and compassion and one on Nietzsche, read not as a prophet of force but as a philosopher of the human.

The ethics/morality line can look like lexical tidiness. It was not. Separating the knowledge of the worth of actions from the enforcement of social norms is, in effect, a refusal to let any prevailing morality — pious, patriotic or progressive — pass itself off as ethics. That refusal cost her allies on every side.

Human rights without a contract#

The application that made her name internationally was to rights. If the value of the human consists in certain capacities the species can realise, then human rights are the demands that protect the conditions under which any individual can realise them. To torture a person, to starve them, to deny them education is to attack those capacities directly. The source of the idea of fundamental rights, on her account, is "the knowledge of the value of certain structural possibilities of the human being as a species". Rights are universal, in other words, but their universality comes from the structure of being human, not from a document that some cultures signed and others did not. The relativist question — why should we accept your Western list? — is answered by denying that rights rest on a list in the first place.

She paired this with a distinction she thought was routinely muddled: human rights are not the same as the many rights that states happen to write into their constitutions. Every human right is a basic right, she argued, but not every right a polity declares basic is a human right; a good deal of what gets called a right is a political preference, and confusing the two weakens the claim that human rights are universal. Conceptual housekeeping of this kind made her one of the more exacting theorists of human-rights education — teaching people to recognise rights as grounded demands rather than slogans. She directed a research centre on the philosophy of human rights, founded in 1997, and served on the International Commission against the Death Penalty, her opposition to capital punishment following from the premise that the value of a human being is not forfeitable.

Whether the premise holds is a fair question, and it was pressed by her own students. To ground rights in "the possibilities of the human" leaves open which possibilities count, and who decides; the appeal to a non-relative value of the human can be made to look like one more value judgment wearing the costume of knowledge. Kuçuradi knew the objections and had answers to them. The answers did not persuade everyone, and she did not pretend otherwise.

The international years#

Her institutional life carried the argument into rooms where philosophers do not usually sit. She joined the FISP steering committee in 1983, was its Secretary-General from 1988 to 1998, President from 1998 to 2003, and Honorary President from 2008. The high point of her presidency was the World Congress of Philosophy held in Istanbul in August 2003 — the twenty-first in the series and the first to meet in Turkey — convened under the theme of philosophy facing the problems of the world, a formulation that was recognisably hers. She went on to preside over the venerable International Institute of Philosophy in Paris from 2014 to 2017. Along the way came the Goethe Medal in 1996, the German Order of Merit in 2001 and UNESCO's Aristotle Medal in 2003.

The books that carry her position in English appeared late and from a scholarly press: Human Rights: Concepts and Problems (2013), Ethics and World Problems and The Idea and the Documents of Human Rights, all from LIT Verlag. They are short and compressed to the point of austerity, built from a few distinctions applied without slack to every text and controversy she touched.

An assessment#

The frame within which she worked is, by the standards of much current ethical theory, an exposed one. The value ontology she inherited — the idea that values have an objective order available to intuition — is hard to defend in a philosophical climate shaped by naturalism. Grounding human rights in the value of the human invites exactly the circularity her critics alleged, as some of the philosophers she trained pointed out.

What survives the objections is a body of distinctions that still does useful work: between values and the judgments that masquerade as them, between ethics and morality, between a human right and a right a government chooses to grant. Kuçuradi was, at the last, a philosopher who refused the easy settlement in both directions — too universalist for the relativists, too insistent on the non-relative for those who wanted rights to rest on nothing firmer than agreement. She held that the philosopher's natural place was neither above the events of the age nor inside their vocabulary, but alongside them, questioning the concepts they are argued in. For a reader coming to her now, among the thinkers philosophy lost in 2026 and not long after the death of Anthony Kenny, the point of entry is not her life but that stubborn wager: that there is something to know about the worth of a human being, and that getting it right is the first task of anyone who wants to defend human beings at all.