The Call for Papers for this conference suggests the topic, “international codes of business conduct.” This paper is intended to present a shift from a discussion of codes, or constraints to be placed upon business, to an entirely different topic: to responsibility, which yields duty, and the reciprocal concept, right. Beyond the framework of external regulation and codes of conduct, voluntary or otherwise, lies another possible accounting system: one of real corporate responsibility, which arises out of the evident capability of (...) businesses to engage in rationally self-regulated activity. If such responsibility can be shown to be comprehensible, then it could bind the activities of corporations ethically, and in rationally compelling legitimate law, just as your activities and mine are bound. Perhaps we can bind the officers of corporations as responsible persons, but I would like to introduce an undiminished conception of responsibility that will back legitimate law for the corporations themselves, as artificial persons. That is the purpose of Part 1 of this paper. In Part 2 I will turn to the case of multinational corporations in particular. I will draw conclusions regarding their general duties and rights, and will dip explicitly into ethical formulations, as well as the ground of legitimate law. I will also indicate a particular rational requirement, or duty, for politically and environmentally sustainable business practices of multinationals. In Part 3 I will discuss jurisdiction for instituting legal sanctions in multinational cases. I will argue that the national laws and civil suits that may be pursued within a court in one nation can actually stand as legitimate checks against abuses carried out by the arms of multinational corporations that reside in other nations. (shrink)

Human rights are a suspect project – this seems the only sensible starting point today. This suspicion, however, is not absolute and the desire to preserve and reform human rights persists for many of us. The most important contemporary critiques of human rights focus on the problematic consequences of the desire for universal rights. Some defenders of human rights accept elements of this critique in their reformulations, but opponents remain wary of the desire to think and act in human rights (...) terms because of their limitations as a political ethics. Yet, we hesitate to abandon human rights. In this article, I look at the political critique of human rights in greater detail. I argue that an agonistic account drawing on the work of William Connolly and Bonnie Honig offers the best response to the most important contemporary critiques of human rights, and a clearer account of what it means to claim that human rights do valuable work. The key developments of this agonistic view of human rights are its focus on the ambiguity of ‘humanity’ as a political identity and the challenge to legitimate authority and membership that new rights claims make. In the end, human rights are defended as a universal political ethos focused on the pluralization and democratization of global politics. (shrink)

Human rights are both a means for the ideological justification of the status quo and for its utopian subversion. In order to account for this paradox we need to consider the role that our capacity to form images plays in human rights discourses. I will first discuss how best to conceptualise the capacity to produce images, which is the focus of this paper. In order to go beyond the impasse generated by philosophical approaches to imagination as an individual faculty, and (...) by sociological approaches to the imaginary understood as a social context, I propose to use the category of the ‘imaginal’, understood simply as that which is made of images and can therefore be both the product of an individual faculty and a social context. Second, I show how the imaginal enters the three major strategies of justifications of human rights, when we think of them as ‘human’, as ‘rights’ and as ‘rational’. Finally, I will show that the imaginal is also the force that compels us to enforce human rights, to put ourselves in the shoes of others and imagine a world that is different from the one in which we are currently living. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:I here advance a critical research agenda for the political perspective of corporate social responsibility (Political CSR). I argue that whilst the ‘Political’ CSR literature is notable for both its conceptual novelty and practical importance, its development has been hamstrung by four ambiguities, conflations and/or oversights. More positively, I argue that ‘Political’ CSR should be conceived as one potentialformof globalization, and not as aconsequenceof ‘globalization’; that contemporary Western MNCs should be presumed to engage in CSR for instrumental reasons; that ‘Political’ (...) CSR should be associated with a corresponding ‘political’ model of corporate governance; and that both a ‘Rawlsian’ and ‘Habermasian’ perspective of Political CSR are different from ‘Political’ CSR. In concluding, I use these four critiques to identify a number of areas within which increasingly robust and sophisticated positive and normative theories of Political CSR are required. (shrink)

Effects of globalization have amplified the magnitude and frequency of corporate abuses, particularly in developing economies where weak or absent rules undermine social norms and principles. Improving multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) ethical conduct is a factor of both the ability of firms to change behaviors in the direction of the moral good, and their willingness to do so. Constraints and enablers of a firm’s ability to act ethically emanate from the external environment, including the industry environment of which the firm is (...) a resident, and the host country environment in which it operates. A firm’s willingness to engage in ethical conduct is determined by the effective bundling of internal resources and the commitment of those resources to social ends. The interaction of external and internal conditions carves out categories of expected firm behaviors and suggests interventions that would push these behaviors in a more positive ethical direction. With reference to integrative social contracts theory (ISCT), these categories of firms are examined, and a conceptual model for analysis is developed to explain the drivers of corporate choices in the adoption and implementation of codes of conduct, and the relative power of relevant communities to the process. (shrink)

Education is oftentimes understood as a deeply ethical practice for the development of the person. Alternatively, education is construed as a state-enforced apparatus for inculcation of specific codes, conventions, beliefs, and norms about social and political practices. Though holding both of these beliefs about education is not necessarily mutually contradictory, a definite tension emerges when one attempts to articulate a cogent theory involving both. I will argue in this paper that Habermas’s theory of discourse ethics, when combined with his statements (...) on constitutional democracy and law, manifests this tension for formal education. Through a contrast with Dewey’s social-liberal view of education on the one hand, and the procedural liberalism and its associated view of education, common to Rawls and others writing in the contemporary Anglo-American tradition on the other, the questions of what this means for education and why it matters are raised and addressed. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose to look closely at certain crucial aspects of the logic of Rawls' argument in Political Liberalism and related subsequent writings. Rawls' argument builds on the notion of comprehensiveness, whereby a doctrine encompasses the full spectrum of the life of its adherents. In order to show the mutual conflict and irreconcilability of comprehensive doctrines, Rawls needs to emphasise the comprehensiveness of doctrines, as their irreconcilability to a large extent emanates from that comprehensiveness. On the other hand, (...) in order to show the possibility and plausibility of the political liberal solution he needs to emphasise that most of these doctrines are reasonable: i.e., they are willing to cede a portion of their authority to political liberalism for the right reasons. Yet, if they are willing to cede a portion of their authority to a political conception they cannot be as comprehensive as we initially thought they were. All these elements highlight the tension in the argument itself. I suggest that many of these tensions can be removed by making Rawls' account more flexible. In this context I propose certain amendments to Rawls' account, which may overcome some of the tensions mentioned above. (shrink)

This article argues that Habermas’s position on the relationship between religion and politics reaffirms his two-track political theory of the secular state and civic duty. His “hard-core” theory of secularism coupled with an ethics of citizenship seeks new ways of including religious citizens in modern pluralistic societies. The analysis of secularism both as a concept and as a guiding principle in Habermas’s work shows that most critics have misinterpreted his specific use of the term. The result of this is that (...) most secularist and accommodationist critics of Habermas’s ethics of citizenship disregard his two-track political theory and its co-originality principle that assumes the equal status of public and private autonomies of citizens. My aim is thus to shift critical attention to the central aspects of Habermas’s work on religion, specifically to the task of translating religious reasons into an all-accessible language. This task of translation faces several difficulties due to some points that are left unclear by Habermas, such as determining the line separating the informal and the formal spheres, and how to avert the risk of majoritarian hijacks of democracy that could altogether undermine the Habermasian framework. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to propose a model for understanding the relation between substance and procedure in discourse ethics and deliberative democracy capable of answering the common charge that they involve an ‘empty formalism’. The expressive-elaboration model introduced here answers this concern by arguing that the deliberative practical rationality presupposed by discourse ethics and deliberative democracy involves the creation of a practical medium in which certain general basic ideas of solidarity, equality and freedom are expressed and elaborated in (...) the context of widespread moral disagreement. In the course of this paper I propose an elucidation of these ideas and argue for the thesis that they are internally related to the endorsement of deliberative practical rationality. The three basic substantive ideas contribute to the determination of the existence, the form, the topics and intended outcomes, and the effects of the practice of public deliberation. This amounts to an elucidatory defense of deliberative practical rationality by explicating its substantive significance or point. Key Words: critical theory • deliberative democracy • discourse ethics • equality • freedom • Jürgen Habermas • practical reason • John Rawls • solidarity • substance and procedure. (shrink)

This paper provides a synopsis of the human rights enforcement in Bangladesh, which marks its 50 years in 2021 since its independence. After a theoretical background on how human rights are perceived as legal and political instruments, it critically discusses human rights provisions and explores the legal and institutional frameworks on human rights enforcement in Bangladesh—(re)construed in 50 years (1971–2021). Finally, it divulges the controversies in human rights enforcement and a roadmap to address them by making some suggestions: multiple legislative, (...) administrative, and judicial reforms are required to tackle human rights abuses to ensure punishment for the abusers and restitution for the victims. The paper concludes with the notion that the positive will of the relevant stakeholders (legislature, executive, and judiciary) is the key to upholding and protecting the human rights of Bangladeshi citizens. The significance of this paper lies in exploring the complexities associated with the laws and insular national politics, which often debars the enforcement of human rights and crucially compromises Bangladesh’s ability to empower its citizens. (shrink)

Against the well-established critical rejection of rights a growing literature in the tradition of agonistic democracy asserts their emancipatory role in the struggles for social change. However, agonistic theorists, invested as they are in the idea of democratic innovation as a process of gradual ‘augmentation’ of existing rules, institutions and practices, fail to account for the ruptural capacity, and hence for the full radical potential, of rights. Using the performative approach, I develop a conception of rights claiming as a defiant (...) practice to express the ruptural dimension of certain forms of rights politics. I demonstrate how defiant rights claiming articulates immanent critique by declaring the incapacity of putative duty-bearer institutions and governments to uphold the claimed right due to structural constraints, thereby generating inevitable contradictions within the extant order and creating the necessity for an alternative one. Moreover, in order to fully capture the emancipatory potential and creative capacity of rights, this article argues for understanding certain forms of rights politics both as augmentation and rupture, taking the two to be different dimensions of the same radical democratic practice. I present the creative use of rights discourse by the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil and the transnational network of agrarian movements, La Via Campesina, as precisely such a combination of the practice of augmentation and defiant claims, which has led to the transformation of the right to food and land into the right to food sovereignty, demonstration of the structural embeddedness of rights violations in the existing global regime of food production and distribution, and authorisation of an alternative vision of the future. (shrink)

The objective of the article is to examine the human rights enforcement in Indonesian legal and political system. This is done by studying the legal basis of human rights, the process of proliferation of human rights discourse, and the actual controversies of human rights enforcement. The study has the effect of highlighting some of the immense deficits in ensuring that violations are treated under judicial procedure and the protection of human rights is available and accessible for victims. The author inevitably (...) came into a conclusion that the openness of legal and political arenas for human rights discourses is not followed with a tangible impact on the entitlement positions of the people. The problems of the weak institutions and the unenthusiastic enforcement show that, in Indonesia, human rights are formally adopted as a political strategy to avoid substantial implementation. (shrink)

Who should be recognized as a refugee? This article seeks to uncover the normative arguments at the core of legal and philosophical conceptions of refugeehood. It identifies three analytically distinct approaches grounding the right to refugee status and argues that all three are normatively inadequate. Refugee status should neither be grounded in individual persecution for specific reasons (classical approach) nor in individual persecution for any discriminatory reasons (human rights approach). It should also not be based solely on harm (humanitarian approach). (...) Rather, this article argues, it should be based on political oppression – on persons lacking public autonomy, formally expressed as a lack of legal–political status. The normative foundation for a claim to refugee status lies in the inability of a person to control, amend and seek recourse to the specific situation she faces. It lies in the lack of public autonomy expressed as a lack of legal–political rights. What matters for a claim to refugee status is thus the legal–political disenfranchisement of a person, ultimately leaving her with no recourse to the particular situation she faces other than flight. Refugees, then, are not only those who fear harm or persecution, but those who are politically oppressed. (shrink)

Paradoxically, the political success of human rights is often taken to be its philosophical failing. From US interventions to International NGOs to indigenous movements, human rights have found a place in diverse political spaces, while being applied to disparate goals and expressed in a range of practices. This heteronomy is vital to the global appeal of human rights, but for traditional moral and political philosophy it is something of a scandal. This paper is an attempt to understand and theorize human (...) rights on the terrain of the social actors who put them to use, particularly radical activists that have a more critical relationship to human rights. Attempting to avoid the philosophical pathology of demanding that the world reflect our conception of it, we base our reflection on the ambiguous, and potentially un-patterned, texture of human rights practice—taking seriously the idea that human rights express a relationship of power, importantly concerned with its legitimate arrangement and limitation. In both the philosophical literature and human rights activism, there seems to be a consensus on basic rights as undeniable moral principles of political legitimacy. This use of human rights is contrasted with radical social movements that reject this conception of rights as ideological and illegitimate, making specific reference to the Zapatista movement (Chiapas, Mexico) and the Landless Peasant Movement of Brazil (MST, from the Portuguese Movimento dos trabalhadores rurais Sem Terra), which are critical of the human rights discourse, but also make strategic use of the idea and offer alternative articulations of political legitimacy. (shrink)

The Western liberal view of human rights has been imposed by the West on the rest of the world as universal values applicable to all cultures and traditions. This paper argues that the Chinese Marxist approach provides an alternative conceptualization of human rights, which entails anti-hegemonic sovereignty, and prioritization of social and economic rights over others. It begins with distinction between false universal and genuine universal to illustrate that the West-promoted universal is false rather than genuine. Western liberal view of (...) human rights is critiqued, followed by different perspectives on sovereignty and human rights. Anti-hegemonic sovereignty, this paper maintains, is a prerequisite for human rights improvements. The right to socio-economic well-being is a top priority for the Chinese government, as Chinese cultural traditions, Confucianism for example, value social and economic rights. The West-touted human rights discourse is intended to retain Western hegemony and seek global dominance. The Communist Party of China (CPC) has strived for human rights on behalf of the Chinese people through such projects as reform and opening-up, poverty alleviation, common prosperity, and Belt and Road Initiative, among other programs. This paper concludes that the Chinese Marxist approach goes beyond the debates over cultural relativism and Western-style “universalism”, and provides an alternative that features genuine universality and privileges the right to socio-economic well-being. (shrink)

Who should be recognized as a refugee? This article seeks to uncover the normative arguments at the core of legal and philosophical conceptions of refugeehood. It identifies three analytically dist...

This paper centres on the question as to whether human rights can be reconciled with patriotism. It lays out the more conventional arguments which perceive them as incommensurable concepts. A central aspect of this incommensurability relates to the close historical tie between patriotism and the state. One further dimension of this argument is then articulated, namely, the contention that patriotism is an explicitly political concept. The implicit antagonism between, on the one hand, the state, politics and patriotism, and, on the (...) other hand, human rights, is illustrated via the work of Carl Schmitt. However, in the last few decades there has been a resurgence of interest in patriotism and an attempt to formulate a more moderate form, which tries to reconcile itself with universal ethical themes. Some of these arguments are briefly summarised; the discussion then focuses on Jürgen Habermas’s understanding of constitutional patriotism. This is seen to provide an effective response to Schmitt’s arguments. There are weaknesses in the constitutional patriotic argument which relate to its limited understanding of both the state and politics. This leads me to formulate my own argument for “unpatriotic patriotism.” The discussion then examines and responds to certain potential criticisms of this argument. (shrink)

Effects of globalization have amplified the magnitude and frequency of corporate abuses, particularly in developing economies where weak or absent rules undermine social norms and principles. Improving multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) ethical conduct is a factor of both the ability of firms to change behaviors in the direction of the moral good, and their willingness to do so. Constraints and enablers of a firm’s ability to act ethically emanate from the external environment, including the industry environment of which the firm is (...) a resident, and the host country environment in which it operates. A firm’s willingness to engage in ethical conduct is determined by the effective bundling of internal resources and the commitment of those resources to social ends. The interaction of external and internal conditions carves out categories of expected firm behaviors and suggests interventions that would push these behaviors in a more positive ethical direction. With reference to integrative social contracts theory (ISCT), these categories of firms are examined, and a conceptual model for analysis is developed to explain the drivers of corporate choices in the adoption and implementation of codes of conduct, and the relative power of relevant communities to the process. (shrink)

Habermas’ cosmopolitan project seeks to transform global politics into an emancipatory activity in order to compensate for the disempowering effects of globalization. The project is traced through three vicious circles which stem from Habermas’ commitment to intersubjectivity. Normative politics always raises a vicious circle because politics is only needed to the extent that an issue has become problematized through want of intersubjective agreement. At domestic level Habermas solves this problem by constitutionalizing transcendental presuppositions that political participants cannot avoid making. This (...) fix will not work at the global level because it is pre-political as between human individuals. Habermas therefore premises cosmopolitics on the transformation of nation-states into sites of participatory politics, engagement in which will eventually ignite a global cosmopolitan consciousness. This transformation depends on the constitutionalization of existing UN structures and their enforcement of an undefined and ‘uncontroversial’ core of human rights. Unable to ground this project in social practice, Habermas eventually disregards his own lodestar of intersubjectivity based in social practice by relying on the prediscursive concept of human dignity. This move is not merely philosophically inconsistent; it also opens the door to the moralization of politics and the imposition of human rights down the barrel of a gun. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article stages an encounter between Habermas and Deleuze on law, rights, and adjudication. Most of the article is spent developing Habermas’s concept of adjudication as the application of communicatively generated norms. This application, I argue, involves a complex temporality that is at once retrospective and non-creative. Deleuze is used to critique this concept of adjudication in favor of one based on concrete situations and the creation of new problems. In so doing, I will develop Deleuze’s notorious, and notoriously hostile, (...) remarks on human rights and philosophies of communication by relating them to discourse ethics and to the positive conception of law and judgment that can be drawn from his work. (shrink)