This fully revised and extended edition of James Nickel's classic study explains and defends the conception of human rights found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent human rights treaties. Combining philosophical, legal, and political approaches, Nickel addresses questions about what human rights are, what their content should be, and whether and how they can be justified.

Including new material as well as previously published articles, John Rees here brings his abilities as both a historian of ideas and a political philosopher to bear in this combination of historical and textual research and philosophical analysis of liberty. A major contribution to the existing literature on Mill, it is also a tribute to an important scholar.

I. Three Basic rights. This book is about the moral minimum--about the lower limits on tolerable human conduct, individual and institutional.

Collected here in a single volume for the first time, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, Considerations on Representative Government, and The Subjection of Women show Mill applying his liberal utilitarian philosophy to a range of issues that remain vital today - issues of the nature of ethics, the scope and limits of individual liberty, the merits of and costs of democratic government, and the place of women in society. In his Introduction John Gray describes these essays as applications of Mill's doctrine of (...) the Art of Life, as set out in A System of Logic. Using the resources of recent revisionist scholarship, he shows Mill's work to be far richer and subtler than traditional interpretations allow. (shrink)

Although Considered By A Few Critics That The Sentence Structures Of The Book Are Quite Incomprehensible And Almost Unbearable To Read, The Book Is An Essential ...

The Metaphysics of Morals is Kant's major work in applied moral philosophy in which he deals with the basic principles of rights and of virtues. It comprises two parts: the 'Doctrine of Right', which deals with the rights which people have or can acquire, and the 'Doctrine of Virtue', which deals with the virtues they ought to acquire. Mary Gregor's translation, revised for publication in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series, is the only complete translation of the (...) whole text, and includes extensive annotation on Kant's difficult and sometimes unfamiliar vocabulary. A new introduction by Roger Sullivan sets the work in its historical and philosophical context. This volume will be of wide interest to students of ethics and of legal and political philosophy. (shrink)

The original edition of Kant: Political Writings was first published in 1970, and has long been established as the principal English-language edition of this important body of writing. In this new, expanded edition two important texts illustrating Kant's view of history are included for the first time, his reviews of Herder's Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind and Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History, as well as the essay What is Orientation in Thinking?. In addition to (...) a general introduction assessing Kant's political thought in terms of his fundamental principles of politics, this edition also contains such useful student aids as notes on the texts, a comprehensive bibliogaphy and a new postscript, looking at some of the principal issues in Kantian scholarship that have arisen since the first edition. (shrink)

Moral universalism centrally involves the idea that the moral assessment of persons and their conduct, of social rules and states of affairs, must be based on fundamental principles that do not, explicitly or covertly, discriminate arbitrarily against particular persons or groups. This general idea is explicated in terms of three conditions. It is then applied to the discrepancy between our criteria of national and global economic justice. Most citizens of developed countries are unwilling to require of the global economic order (...) what they assuredly require of any national economic order, for example, that its rules be under democratic control, that it preclude life-threatening poverty as far as is reasonably possible. Without a plausible justification, such a double standard constitutes covert arbitrary discrimination against the global poor. Key Words: contextualism • corruption • discrimination • Rawls • resource exports • world poverty. (shrink)

This article argues that Hayek's Road to Serfdom should be read in the light of his contemporaneous studies in the history of European social and political thought, and traces the affinities between his and Halévy's work on the history of socialism. Both saw Saint-Simonism rather than Marxism as embodying the essence of socialism, and both saw the cult of `organization', rather than the idea of class conflict, as its most characteristic feature. It is tentatively suggested that Halévy's writings exercised a (...) significant influence on the formulation of Hayek's most famous work. (shrink)

Recent scholarship in technology and society studies has given attention to the notion of technological citizenship. This article seeks to further integrate perspectives on this topic with theoretical contributions about the development of moral autonomy. The author challenges the presumption that the strategy of expanding opportunities for participation in technological decision making will in itself develop people's autonomy and citizenship. He argues that concurrent efforts must be made to democratize the political-economic structures of key technologies and to help people prepare (...) morally for citizenship roles in governing these technologies. On this basis, a series of initiatives are suggested. (shrink)

This paper explores the ethical obligations of pharmaceutical companies to charge fair prices for essential medicines. The moral issue at stake here is distributive justice. Rawls'' framework is especially germane since it underlines the material benefits everyone deserves as Kantian persons and the need for an egalitarian approach for the distribution of society''s essential commodities such as health care. This concern for distributive justice should be a critical factor in the equation of variables used to set prices for pharmaceuticals.

Abstract:Our research investigated pricing policies of fast-food restaurants in predominantly black neighborhoods. We argue that the lack of monitoring of franchisees’ pricing policies leads to higher prices. Results indicate that franchisees are significantly more likely than company-owned outlets to charge higher prices based on the proportion of blacks in a neighborhood. These price differences do not appear to be explained away by cost or competition factors. Our findings do not establish an intent to discriminate; nevertheless, we discuss the fairness of (...) the pricing structure found. (shrink)

Invisible Hand accounts of the operations of the competitive market are often thought to have two implications for morality as it confronts economic life. First, explanantions of agents economic activities eschew constitutive appeal to moral notions; and second, such moralism is pernicious insofar as it tends to undermine the operations of a socially valuable social process. This is the Mandevillean Conceit. The Conceit rests on an avarice-only reading of the profit-motive that is mistaken. The avarice-only reading is not the only (...) way of characterising the profit-motive, and there are some positive grounds for thinking the benefits of profit pursuit are better attributed to the “lucrephile”, and not the avarice-only “lucrepath”. (shrink)

Recently among analytic political philosophers there has been a considerable revival of interest in the normative evaluation of the market and of economic processes more generally. While not rejecting markets in toto , philosophers such as Elizabeth Anderson and Amartya Sen have raised questions about the proper range of the market, explored the role of normative considerations in economic decision-making and raised doubts about the view that normative constraints are never legitimately placed on economic activity. In this article I experience (...) the relevance to such explorations of the economic casuistry of the medieval schoolmen. Key Words: Just Price • medieval philosophy • usury • distributive justice • Aquinas. (shrink)

This article argues that Hayek's Road to Serfdom should be read in the light of his contemporaneous studies in the history of European social and political thought, and traces the affinities between his and Halévy's work on the history of socialism. Both saw Saint-Simonism rather than Marxism as embodying the essence of socialism, and both saw the cult of `organization', rather than the idea of class conflict, as its most characteristic feature. It is tentatively suggested that Halévy's writings exercised a (...) significant influence on the formulation of Hayek's most famous work. (shrink)

Invisible Hand accounts of the operations of the competitive market are often thought to have two implications for morality as it confronts economic life. First, explanations of agents economic activities eschew constitutive appeal to moral notions; and second, such moralism is pernicious insofar as it tends to undermine the operations of a socially valuable social process. This is the Mandevillean Conceit. The Conceit rests on an avarice-only reading of the profit-motive that is mistaken. The avarice-only reading is not the only (...) way of characterising the profit-motive, and there are some positive grounds for thinking the benefits of profit pursuit are better attributed to the "lucrephile", and not the avarice-only "lucrepath". (shrink)

This ground-breaking text offers a fresh perspective on the governance of science from the standpoint of social and political theory. Science has often been seen as the only institution that embodies the elusive democratic ideal of the 'open society'. Yet, science remains an elite activity that commands much more public trust than understanding, even though science has become increasingly entangled with larger political and economic issues.

Science and technology has introduced us to a previously unimaginable world of wealth, health, comfort, education, recreation, convenience and many more benefits. It has also brought with it many unwelcome guests and visitors. The guests are those intended outcomes of our deployment of technology; the visitors are often unexpected or unforeseen outcomes. Much of the current debate around the impacts of science and technology concerns fears about unwanted consequences. The end of the Cold War allowed us to conceive, rightly or (...) wrongly, of a safer military climate. But it did not mean a significantly less contingent world, as the Chernobyl disaster and the events of 9/11 and a general rise in global terror graphically reminded us. A great deal has been written and spoken about the risk society. It is not important here to deal in depth with that term, but whatever label we place on it, we live in a planet of new and emerging contingencies, which we need to manage, harness or contain if we are to prosper. We need to develop new ways in which to assess and make decisions about the deployment of new and existing technologies. This is a key problem now because science and technology are transforming our world. In this contingent contemporary reality we need to make decisions about technologies very few understand. We need to balance progress with risk, caution with lost opportunity. Decisions need to be made at global, supranational, national, regional and local levels across a complex web of often-interconnected issues. Most theorist, decision-makers and ordinary citizens see democracy as the preferred model for decision-making. There is a high degree of consensus that any institutional arrangements to deal with the new technological and scientific concerns need to be democratic ones. Unanimity dissipates though when it comes to either framing ways to deploy democracy or reaching common understandings of what it means. The contemporary period is one in which science and technology is playing a significant role in shaping everyday lives. As citizens this challenges us to address issues around the decision-making process at the level of political participation, regulation and control of science and technology. Increasingly ordinary citizens are called upon to make difficult private and public decisions about science and technology. The climate in which those decisions, discussions and debates take place has changed considerably in recent decades - civil society and the public sphere have undergone major shifts. The meaning of democracy is contested at a time when democracy is seen as the panacea for all issues of governance. On one side the influence of Neo-Liberalism places greater emphasis on what are seen as the characteristics of classical liberalism, where the autonomous free acting individual sits at the centre of things. This actor is rational and market-oriented. Decisions are made in terms of rational choice, each individual acts to maximize his or her wealth, health and happiness. It transfers the emphasis from the collective to the individual or we might say from the public sphere to the private sphere. This derives from an interpretation of early economic thinkers like Adam Smith. The assumption is that society works best when governments allow individuals express their preferences as rational actors and allow a de-regulated market respond to these preferences through the laws of supply and demand. On the other side civic republicanism and much of liberal thinking from John Stuart Mill in the 19th century to J. M. Keynes and T. H. Marshall in the 20th century present a case for understanding citizens not just as formally equally, but also as factually equal. From that perspective notions like society, solidarity and the common good have a higher premium. While Neo-Liberalism was pushing that agenda to the background in most developed countries from the 1970s, there were countervailing forces changing the political landscape. These include an erosion of the position, power and even legitimacy of some of the main pillars of liberal representative democracy. Less people vote, national parliaments concede power both upwards to international bodies and downwards to regional and local ones. We see a dynamic and fluid web of social movements engage around all the issues of the day from local to global. The media, including the Internet, facilitates public awareness, discussion and debate around issues and facilitates the formation of public opinion in a process that Strydom (1999b) calls triple contingency. Issues like responsibility and risk emerge as serious concerns. It is in this context that I wish to propose a model for democratic engagement with issues around science and technology. In designing my model of political participation I am hoping to address both opinion and policy formation on science and technology issues. (shrink)