In this article, I sketch a Kant-inspired liberal account of humanrights: the freedom-centred view. This account conceptualizes humanrights as entitlements that any political authority—any state in the first instance—must secure to qualify as a guarantor of its subjects' innate right to freedom. On this picture, when a state (or state-like institution) protects humanrights, it reasonably qualifies as a moral agent to be treated with respect. By contrast, when a state (or state-like (...) institution) fails to protect humanrights, it loses its moral status and becomes liable to both internal and external interference. I argue that this account not only steers a middle course between so-called natural-law and political approaches to humanrights but also satisfies three important theoretical desiderata— explanatory power, functional specificity, and critical capacity. (shrink)
What grounds humanrights? How do we determine that something is a genuine human right? This chapter offers a new answer: human beings have humanrights to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life. The fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life are certain goods, capacities, and options that human beings qua human beings need whatever else they qua individuals might need in order to pursue a characteristically good human life. (...) This chapter explains how this Fundamental Conditions Approach is better than James Griffin’s Agency Approach as well as Martha Nussbaum’s Central Capabilities Approach. It also shows how it can be compatible with the increasingly popular Political Conceptions of humanrights defended by John Rawls, Charles Beitz, and Joseph Raz. (shrink)
This paper explores the connections between humanrights, human dignity, and power. The idea of human dignity is omnipresent in humanrights discourse, but its meaning and point is not always clear. It is standardly used in two ways, to refer to a normative status of persons that makes their treatment in terms of humanrights a proper response, and a social condition of persons in which their humanrights are (...) fulfilled. This paper pursues three tasks. First, it provides an analysis of the content and an interpretation of the role of the idea of human dignity in current humanrights discourse. The interpretation includes a pluralist view of human interests and dignity that avoids a narrow focus on rational agency. Second, this paper characterizes the two aspects of human dignity in terms of capabilities. Certain general human capabilities are among the facts that ground status-dignity, and the presence of certain more specific capabilities constitutes condition-dignity. Finally, this paper explores how the pursuit of humanrights and human dignity links to distributions and uses of power. Since capabilities are a form of power, and humanrights are in part aimed at respecting and promoting capabilities, humanrights involve empowerment. Exploring the connections between humanrights, capabilities, and empowerment provides resources to defend controversial humanrights such as the right to democratic political participation, and to respond to worries about the feasibility of their fulfillment. This paper also argues that empowerment must be coupled with solidaristic concern in order to respond to unavoidable facts of social dependency and vulnerability. (shrink)
In an article previously published in this Journal, Anthony Oyowe critically engages with my attempt to demonstrate how the humanrights characteristic of South Africa’s Constitution can be grounded on a certain interpretation of Afro-communitarian values that are often associated with talk of ‘ubuntu’. Drawing on recurrent themes of human dignity and communal relationships in the sub-Saharan tradition, I have advanced a moral-philosophical principle that I argue entails and plausibly explains a wide array of individual rights (...) to civil liberties, political power, criminal procedures and economic resources. Oyowe’s most important criticism of my theory is in effect that it is caught in a dilemma: either the principle I articulate can account for humanrights, in which case it does not count as communitarian, or it does count as the latter, but cannot account for the former. In this article, I reply to Oyowe, contending that he misinterprets key facets of my theory to the point of not yet engaging with its core strategy for deriving humanrights from salient elements of ubuntu. I conclude that Oyowe is unjustified in claiming that there are ‘theoretical lapses’ that ‘cast enormous doubts’ on my project of deriving humanrights from a basic moral principle with a recognizably sub-Saharan and communitarian pedigree. (shrink)
What should we make of claims by members of other groups to have moralities different from our own? HumanRights in Chinese Thought gives an extended answer to this question in the first study of its kind. It integrates a full account of the development of Chinese rights discourse - reaching back to important, though neglected, origins of that discourse in 17th and 18th century Confucianism - with philosophical consideration of how various communities should respond to contemporary (...) Chinese claims about the uniqueness of their humanrights concepts. The book elaborates a plausible kind of moral pluralism and demonstrates that Chinese ideas of humanrights do indeed have distinctive characteristics, but it nonetheless argues for the importance and promise of cross-cultural moral engagement. (shrink)
This article addresses the so-called to humanrights. Focusing specifically on the work of Onora O'Neill, the article challenges two important aspects of her version of this objection. First: its narrowness. O'Neill understands the claimability of a right to depend on the identification of its duty-bearers. But there is good reason to think that the claimability of a right depends on more than just that, which makes abstract (and not welfare) rights the most natural target of her (...) objection (section II). After examining whether we might address this reformulated version of O'Neill's objection by appealing to the specificity afforded to humanrights in international, regional and domestic law (in section III), the article challenges a second important feature of that objection by raising doubts about whether claimability is a necessary feature of rights at all (section IV). Finally, the article reflects more generally on the role of abstraction in the theory and practice of humanrights (section V). In sum, by allaying claimability-based concerns about abstract rights, and by illustrating some of the positive functions of abstraction in rights discourse, the article hopes to show that abstract rights are not only theoretically coherent but also useful and important. (shrink)
Humanrights are often defined as entitlements that human beings possess just by virtue of their inherent dignity. This conceptual link between humanrights and inherent dignity is as popular as it is unhelpful. It invites metaphysical disputes about what, exactly, endows human beings with inherent dignity, and distracts from the core function of humanrights: placing constraints on powerful actors, especially states. In response to this difficulty, I reconceptualize the relationship between (...)humanrights and dignity in a way that maximally serves humanrights’ purpose. I do so by distinguishing between ‘inherent dignity’ and ‘status dignity’, and by linking humanrights to the latter, not the former. First, I argue that humanrights articulate standards for respecting the status dignity of the subjects of sovereign authority, rather than the inherent dignity of human beings qua humans. Second, I suggest that not only individuals but also corporate agents possess status dignity. In particular, states that violate humanrights lose their status dignity, thereby becoming liable to interference. (shrink)
Humanrights are particularly relevant in contexts in which there are significant asymmetries of power, but where these asymmetries exist the humanrights project turns out to be especially difficult to realize. The stronger can use their disproportionate power both to threaten others’ humanrights and to frustrate attempts to secure their fulfillment. They may even monopolize the international discussion as to what humanrights are and how they should be implemented. This (...) paper explores this tension between the normative ideal of humanrights and the facts of asymmetric power. It has two objectives. The first, pursued in section 2, is to reconstruct and assess a set of important power-related worries about humanrights. These worries are sometimes presented as falsifying the view that humanrights exist, or at least as warranting the abandonment of humanrights practice. The paper argues that the worries do not support such conclusions. Instead, they motivate the identification of certain desiderata for the amelioration of humanrights practice. The paper proceeds to articulate twelve such desiderata. The second objective, pursued in section 3, is to propose a strategy for satisfying the desiderata identified in the previous section. In particular, the paper suggests some ways to build empowerment into the humanrights project that reduce the absolute and relative powerlessness of humanrights holders, while also identifying an ethics of responsibility and solidarity for contexts in which power asymmetries will not dissolve. Power analysis does not debunk the humanrights project. Properly articulated, it is an important tool for those pursuing it. (shrink)
Despite the prevalence of humanrights discourse, the very idea or concept of a human right remains obscure. In particular, it is unclear what is supposed to be special or distinctive about humanrights. In this paper, we consider two recent attempts to answer this challenge, James Griffin’s “personhood account” and Charles Beitz’s “practice-based account”, and argue that neither is entirely satisfactory. We then conclude with a suggestion for what a more adequate account might look (...) like – what we call the “structural pluralist account” of humanrights. (shrink)
Humanrights have a rich life in the world around us. Political rhetoric pays tribute to them, or scorns them. Citizens and activists strive for them. The law enshrines them. And they live inside us too. For many of us, humanrights form part of how we understand the world and what must (or must not) be done within it. -/- The ubiquity of humanrights raises questions for the philosopher. If we want to (...) understand these rights, where do we look? As a set of moral norms, it is tempting to think they can be grasped strictly from the armchair, say, by appeal to moral intuition. But what, if anything, can that kind of inquiry tell us about the humanrights of contemporary politics, law, and civil society — that is, humanrights as we ordinarily know them? -/- This volume brings together a distinguished, interdisciplinary group of scholars to address philosophical questions raised by the many facets of humanrights: moral, legal, political, and historical. Its original chapters, each accompanied by a critical commentary, explore topics including: the purpose and methods of a philosophical theory of humanrights; the "Orthodox-Political" debate; the relevance of history to philosophy; the relationship between humanrights morality and law; and the value of political critiques of humanrights. (shrink)
This paper defends several highly revisionary theses about humanrights. Section 1 shows that the phrase 'humanrights' refers to two distinct types of moral claims. Sections 2 and 3 argue that several longstanding problems in humanrights theory and practice can be solved if, and only if, the concept of a human right is replaced by two more exact concepts: (A) International humanrights, which are moral claims sufficient to warrant (...) coercive domestic and international social protection; and (B) Domestic humanrights, which are moral claims sufficient to warrant coercive domestic social protection but only non-coercive international action. Section 3 then argues that because coercion is central to both types of humanrights, and coercion is a matter of justice, the traditional view of humanrights -- that they are normative entitlements prior to and independent of substantive theories of justice -- is incorrect. Humanrights must instead be seen as emerging from substantive theories of domestic and international justice. Finally, Section 4 uses this reconceptualization to show that only a few very minimal claims about international humanrights are presently warranted. Because international humanrights are rights of international justice, but theorists of international justice disagree widely about the demands of international justice, much more research on international justice is needed -- and much greater agreement about international justice should be reached -- before anything more than a very minimal list of international humanrights can be justified. (shrink)
Philosophical discussion of humanrights has long been monopolised by what might be called the ‘natural-law view’. On this view, humanrights are fundamental moral rights which people enjoy solely by virtue of their humanity. In recent years, a number of theorists have started to question the validity of this outlook, advocating instead what they call a ‘political’ view. My aim in this article is to explore the latter view in order to establish whether it (...) constitutes a valuable alternative to the ‘natural-law view’. In particular, I distinguish between three ways in which humanrights can be political: in relation to their (1) iudicandum, (2) justification and (3) feasibility constraints. I argue that it makes sense to think of humanrights as political in relation to both their iudicandum and their justification but in a way that is not always adequately captured by proponents of the political view. Moreover, I also claim that, if we take the political view seriously, we still need to engage in the sort of abstract moral reasoning that characterises the natural-law approach and which proponents of the political view significantly downplay. (shrink)
In her 2004 book Carol Gould addresses the fundamental issue of democratizing globalization, that is to say of finding ways to open transnational institutions and communities to democratic participation by those widely affected by their decisions. The book develops a framework for expanding participation in crossborder decisions, arguing for a broader understanding of humanrights and introducing a new role for the ideas of care and solidarity at a distance. Reinterpreting the idea of universality to accommodate a multiplicity (...) of cultural perspectives, the author takes up a number of applied issues, including the persistence of racism, cultural rights, women's humanrights, the democratic management of firms, the use of the Internet to enhance political participation, and the importance of empathy and genuine democracy in understanding terrorism and responding to it. Accessibly written with a minimum of technical jargon this is a major contribution to political philosophy. (shrink)
The discursive character of humanrights prevents a precise summary of historical origin, rationale, or definition outside of the various codifications in religious texts, secular philosophies, founding national documents, and international treaties, charters, conventions, covenants, declarations, and protocols. Regarding the objects of humanrights, we can speak of a “foundational five” 1) Personal security 2) Material subsistence 3) Elemental equality 4) Personal Freedom and 5) Recognition as a member of the human community. Despite, or perhaps (...) because of its multivalence, the concept of humanrights has been criticized as “foundationalist,” “essentialist,” or “ethnocentric”—its universalism being used as a weapon against itself by critics of cultural imperialism. Even the tolerance discourses so popular in critical theory, however, gain their normative force from the same basic notion of individual or group rights. Notwithstanding these rhetorical abuses, the concept of humanrights has proved robust as a doctrine of equality owing to its openness to a pluralism of justifications grounding the basic “goods” agreed as necessary for human development. (shrink)
In the present article, I will evaluate the utility of environmental humanrights in the light of the global climate conditions prevailing in the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century. Humanrights and their tools have proven useful on many occasions. Here I will promote the idea that the ecological situation we are facing now is so urgent that we should exploit their potential to the fullest. To that end, I will argue, there (...) is a clear need to render environmental rights as explicit, precise and thus legally binding as possible. It is tried to adopt a point of view that is informed by both scientific findings and the theory of humanrights; the conclusions are definitely intended to be pragmatic. (shrink)
The purpose of the following study is that of providing a critical anal‑ ysis of Intellectual Property (IP), with a closer look on copyright, in the context of humanrights. My main conjecture is the following : the legal infrastructure stemming from the implications of copyrights which states created has nega‑ tive consequences if we have a closer look at some humanrights specified by The Universal Declaration of HumanRights (UDHR). For example, copyrights (...) are, in my view, incompatible with the humanrights which specify that (1) hu‑ man beings have a right to freely take part in the cultural and scientific life of the communities which they inhabit and (2) human beings have a right to own property. My main hypothesis is the following : if copyrights are, in fact, more difficult to ground from a moral perspective, then this considerations must trump the provision of the 27th article of the UDHR, which states that creators, be they artists or researchers, have a human right to have their moral and mate‑ rial interests protected with regard to their intellectual products, if this amounts to a justification for a copyright. (shrink)
A recently developed view in political theory holds that only political agents, particularly states, can be primary bearers of human-rights duties. Problematically, this so-called ‘political view’ appears unable to account for the human-rights responsibilities of powerful non-state actors, such as transnational corporations (TNCs). Can a recognizably political view respond to this concern? I show that, once the moral underpinnings of the political view are made explicit, it can. I suggest that, on the political view, what makes (...) states primary bearers of human-rights duties is their possession of both (i) the capacity to fulfill human right and (ii) what I call the ‘authority-plus-sovereignty package’. Building on the existing literature on the moral responsibilities of TNCs, I argue that some TNCs—especially in areas of weak governance—meet these two conditions. I thus conclude that they count as bearers of primary human-rights responsibilities even from within a political perspective on humanrights. (shrink)
It is often said that humanrights are the rights that people possess simply in virtue of being human – that is, in virtue of their intrinsic, dignity-defining common humanity. Yet, on closer inspection the humanrights landscape doesn’t look so even. Once we bring perpetrators of humanrights abuse and their victims into the picture, attributions of humanity to persons become unstable. In this essay, I trace the ways in which (...) class='Hi'>rights discourse ascribes variable humanity to certain categories of people. I set the stage for my discussion of the human in relation to humanrights by examining John Locke’s account of the justification for punishment. For Locke, in committing a crime one abrogates one’s humanity and forfeits one’s rights. Likewise, I argue, humanrights discourse takes a scalar view of humanity. I consider victims of genocide who are dehumanized as helpless and passive, victims of state persecution who are super-humanized as righteously agentic, and perpetrators of genocide who are dehumanized as out-of-control beasts. In each case I use relevant testimony to argue that the scalar view of humanity is factually incorrect and morally deplorable. For genocide victims, I discuss testimony that Selma Leydesdorff gathered from women who survived the Srebrenica massacre. For a victim of persecution, I discuss Liao Yiwu’s memoire of his detention and imprisonment in China because of his artwork protesting the Tiananmen Square massacre. For perpetrators of genocide, I discuss testimony Jean Hatzfeld gathered from Hutu men who systematically murdered Tutsis in the Rwandan genocide. Finally, I apply my critique of dehumanized and super-humanized victims and dehumanized perpetrators to the problem of transnational trafficking in persons and argue that the view I advocate necessitates reforming immigration policy with respect to persons trafficked into forced labor. (shrink)
There are three major reasons that ideas associated with ubuntu are often deemed to be an inappropriate basis for a public morality. One is that they are too vague, a second is that they fail to acknowledge the value of individual freedom, and a third is that they a fit traditional, small-scale culture more than a modern, industrial society. In this article, I provide a philosophical interpretation of ubuntu that is not vulnerable to these three objections. Specifically, I construct a (...) moral theory grounded on southern African worldviews, one that suggests a promising new conception of human dignity. According to this conception, typical human beings have a dignity in virtue of their capacity for community, understood as the combination of identifying with others and exhibiting solidarity with them, where humanrights violations are egregious degradations of this capacity. I argue that this account of humanrights violations straightforwardly entails and explains many different elements of South Africa’s Bill of Rights and naturally suggests certain ways of resolving contemporary moral dilemmas in South Africa and elsewhere relating to land reform, political power and deadly force. (shrink)
With the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of HumanRights, the idea of humanrights came into its own on the world stage. More than anything, the Declaration was a response to the Holocaust, to both its perpetrators and the failure of the rest of the world adequately to come to the aid of its victims. Since that year, however, we have seen many more cases of mass murder. Think of China, Bali, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, the former (...) Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and now Darfur. Of course one could always claim that such horrors would have been even more frequent if not for the Declaration. But I want to argue otherwise. For I believe that humanrights have contributed to making mass murder more, rather than less, likely. To be clear, my concern is specifically with the language of humanrights, not the values it expresses, values which I certainly endorse. The problem with this language is that it is abstract. And the problem with abstraction is that it demotivates, it 'unplugs' us from the 'moral sources,' as Charles Taylor would call them, which empower us to act ethically. After showing why, I then go on to describe how the rise of humanrights has constituted an ironic tragedy of sorts for those philosophers who have attempted to lend it intellectual support. On the whole, they may be divided into two groups. One, led by cosmopolitans such as Martha Nussbaum and Thomas Pogge, tries to interlock rights within systematic theories of justice, thus fixing the priorities between them. The other, led by value pluralists such as Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams, rejects such theories as infeasible and asserts that the best we can do when rights conflict is to negotiate. Yet both approaches, I argue, are counter-productive. (shrink)
A standard objection to socioeconomic humanrights is that they are not claimable as humanrights: their correlative duties are not owed to each human, independently of specific institutional arrangements, in an enforceable manner. I consider recent responses to this ‘claimability objection,’ and argue that none succeeds. There are no humanrights to socioeconomic goods. But all is not lost: there are, I suggest, humanrights to ‘socioeconomic consideration’. I propose a (...) detailed structure for these rights and their correlative duties, while remaining neutral on substantive moral debates. I argue that socioeconomic-consideration humanrights are satisfactorily claimable and sufficiently practical. (shrink)
Many theorists understand humanrights as only aiming to secure a minimally decent existence, rather than a positively good or flourishing life. Some of the theoretical considerations that support this minimalist view have been mapped out in the philosophical literature. The aim of this paper is to explain how a relatively neglected theoretical desideratum – namely, determinacy – can be invoked in arguing for humanrights minimalism. Most of us want a theory of human (...) class='Hi'>rights whose demands can be realized, and which is acceptable to a range of worldviews. But we might also expect our theory to provide determinate answers to questions of scope (i.e. which putative rights are bona fide humanrights?) and practical implementation (i.e. what concrete duties are generated by which rights?). A minimalist view of humanrights makes it is easier to jointly fulfil all of these desiderata. (shrink)
A wide range of proposals to alleviate the negative effects of intellectual property regimes is currently under discussion. This article offers a critical evaluation of six of these proposals: the Health Impact Fund, the Access to Knowledge movement, prize systems, open innovation models, compulsory licenses and South-South collaborations. An assessment on how these proposals target the humanrights affected by intellectual property will be provided. The conflicting humanrights that will be individually discussed are the (...) class='Hi'>rights: to benefit from one’s own scientific work, to benefit from the advancement of science, to participate in scientific enterprises and to self-determination. (shrink)
_The Challenge of Human Rights_ traces the history of humanrights theory from classical antiquity through the enlightenment to the modern humanrights movement, and analyses the significance of humanrights in today’s increasingly globalized world. Provides an engaging study of the origin and the philosophical and political development of humanrights discourse. Offers an original defence of humanrights. Explores the significance of humanrights in the (...) context of increasing globalisation. Confronts the major objections to humanrights, including the charge of western ethical imperialism and cultural relativism. Argues that humanrights logically culminate in an ethical cosmopolitanism to reflect the moral unity of the human race. (shrink)
Having followed the literature on genocide since the beginning of 1990s I have been often struck that academic writing on genocide is very much like non-professional pursuits in youth sports: anything is considered 'a good try'. The French have a good phrase for what I mean here: n'importe quoi. Works exhibiting no sound methodology, replete with irrational claims without factual basis and beliefs about foreigners adopted on faith limited only by a 'the worse the better' criterion of plausibility dominate the (...) literature on genocide. My only consolation in confronting this literature has been that philosophers, for the most part, had not been the ones taking part in this orgy of nonsense. The book Genocide and HumanRights takes even that solace away as it purports to be 'a philosophical guide' to genocide. (shrink)
This collection brings together fourteen contributions by authors from around the globe. Each of the contributions engages with questions about how local and global bioethical issues are made to be comparable, in the hope of redressing basic needs and demands for justice. These works demonstrate the significant conceptual contributions that can be made through feminists' attention to debates in a range of interrelated fields, especially as they formulate appropriate responses to developments in medical technology, global economics, population shifts, and poverty.
Society has reached a new rupture in the digital age. Traditional technologies of biopower designed around coercion no longer dominate. Psychopower has manifested, and its implementation has changed the way one understands biopolitics. This discussion note references Byung-Chul Han’s interpretation of modern psychopolitics to investigate whether basic humanrights violations are committed by Facebook, Inc.’s product against its users at a psychopolitical level. This analysis finds that Facebook use can lead to international humanrights violations, specifically (...) cultural rights, social rights, rights to self-determination, political rights, and the right to health. (shrink)
Business ethics should include illicit businesses as targets of investigation. For, though such businesses violate humanrights they have been largely ignored by business ethicists. It is time to surmount this indifference in view of recent international efforts to define illicit businesses for regulatory purposes. Standing in the way, however, is a meta-ethical question as to whether any business can be declared unqualifiedly immoral. In support of an affirmative answer I address a number of counter-indications by comparing approaches (...) to organized crime and to corporate crime, comparing the ethical critique of businesses studied in business ethics and those socially banned, and comparing the business ethics assumption as to businesses’ ethicality to societal ethical neutrality regarding war-related businesses. My conclusion: to help advance respect for humanrights, business ethicists should apply their expertise to the task of defining illicit businesses. (shrink)
Early discussions of ?climate justice? have been dominated by economists rather than political philosophers. More recently, analytical liberal political philosophers have joined the debate. However, the philosophical discussion of climate justice remains in its early stages. This paper considers one promising approach based on humanrights, which has been advocated recently by several theorists, including Simon Caney, Henry Shue and Tim Hayward. A basic argument supporting the claim that anthropogenic climate change violates humanrights is presented. (...) Four objections to this argument are examined: the ?future persons? objection; the ?risk? objection; the ?collective causation? objection; and the ?demandingness? objection. This critical examination leads to a more detailed specification and defence of the claim that anthropogenic climate change violates humanrights. (shrink)
Humanrights theory and practice have long been stuck in a rut. Although disagreement is the norm in philosophy and social-political practice, the sheer depth and breadth of disagreement about humanrights is truly unusual. Humanrights theorists and practitioners disagree – wildly in many cases – over just about every issue: what humanrights are, what they are for, how many of them there are, how they are justified, what human (...) interests or capacities they are supposed to protect, what they require of persons and institutions, etc. Disagreement about humanrights is so profound, in fact, that several prominent theorists have remarked that the very concept of a “human right” appears nearly criterionless. In my 2012 article, “Reconceptualizing HumanRights”, I diagnosed the root cause of these problems. Theorists and practitioners have falsely supposed that the concept of “human right” picks out a single, unified class of moral entitlements. However, the concept actually refers to two fundamentally different types of moral entitlements: (A) international humanrights, which are universal human moral entitlements to coercive international protections, and (B) domestic humanrights, which are universal human moral entitlements to coercive domestic protections. Accordingly, I argue, an adequate “theory of humanrights” must be a dual theory. The present paper provides the first such theory. First, I show that almost every justificatory ground given for “humanrights” in the literature – such as the notion of a “minimally decent human life”, “urgent human interests”, and “human needs” – faces at least one of two fatal problems. Second, I show that after some revisions, James Griffin’s conception of “personhood” provides a compelling justificatory ground for international humanrights. Third, I show that the account entails that there are very few international humanrights – far fewer than existing humanrights theories and practices suggest. Fourth, I show that there are reasons to find my very short list of international humanrights compelling: “humanrights justifications” for coercive international and foreign policy actions over the past several decades have consistently overstepped what can be morally justified, and my account reveals precisely how existing humanrights theories and practices have failed to adequately grapple with these moral hazards. Finally, I outline an account of domestic humanrights which fits well with many existing humanrights beliefs and practices, vindicating those beliefs and practices, but only at a domestic level. (shrink)
This book manuscript, entitled United Nations HumanRights Ethics: For The Greatest Success of the Greatest Number, critically examines most all major normative ethical theories since Socrates and finds Roman Stoic ethics to be the least deficient. It divides ethical theories into popular ones with little academic support, other popular ones that have had such support, and Kantian ethics standing alone as a philosopher's academic ethical philosophy with limited popular support. It criticizes the appropriation of human (...) class='Hi'>rights by the international law profession to the exclusion of moral philosophy, despite the origin of "humanrights" in the moral philosopher Rousseau. It blames the inability of moral philosophers to reach a professional consensus on the elements of normative ethics, not the legal profession. It laments both the failure of humanrights education to human beings everywhere as requested by the Universal Declaration and the decline in popular support for humanrights in favor of nationalism in current history since 2015. It advocates a way of redirecting human right education to people on the ground rather than mainly to law students. Such education has been overtaken by the Rule of Law movement fighting high crimes crimes against humanity unanticipated by the Universal Declaration. It argues for a way for ethicists to get on the same page in teaching elements in ethics and argues forcefully for a positive method for popular humanrights education as well as for humanrights-based elementary ethical theory. (shrink)
The paper addresses the nature of duties grounded in humanrights. Rather than being protections against harm, per se, I contend that humanrights largely shield against risk impositions to protected interests. “Risk imposition” is a normative idea requiring explication, but understanding dutiful action in its terms enables humanrights to provide prospective policy guidance, hold institutions accountable, operate in non-ideal circumstances, embody impartiality among persons, and define the moral status of agencies in international (...) relations. Slightly differently, I indicate a general understanding of dutiful action that permits humanrights to see to the tasks of an institutional morality. (shrink)
This essay claims that a rupture between two languages permeates humanrights discourse in contemporary Anglo-American legal thought. Humanrights law is no exception. The one language is written in the sense that a signifying relation inscribed by institutional authors represents concepts. Theories of law have shared such a preoccupation with concepts. Legal rules, doctrines, principles, rights and duties exemplify legal concepts. One is mindful of the dominant tradition of Anglo-American conceptual jurisprudence in this regard. (...) Words have been thought to copy ready-made concepts. Acts of intellectualisation and the accompanying analytic technique have excluded a consideration of a very different sense of legal language. The second sense of a language concentrates upon unwritten acts of meaning which lack a discrete and assignable author. This essay aims to unconceal the importance of an unauthored language. Drawing from Edmund Husserl’s early writings, particularly his Logical Investigations, I shall argue that an unwritten language embodies the written language with acts of meaning. An act of meaning confers one’s experiential body into the content of a concept signified in a written language. In order to understand the importance of such pre-legal acts of meaning in humanrights laws, I begin by outlining how universal humanrights have been signified as universal by virtue of their content-independence. I then raise the problem of the exclusion of social-cultural phenomena as elements of humanrights laws. The clue to this exclusionary character of humanrights law rests in the analytic leap from an unwritten to a written legal language. The essay then addresses the effort to link legality with the social world: namely, the effort of grounding legality in a social convention. I examine how a social convention itself is conceptualized, leaving the remainder of acts of meaning. This failure of social conventions to access social-cultural phenomena encourages me to turn to acts of meaning as such acts were understood by Edmund Husserl in his earlier works. Meaning-constituting acts exist prior to intuitions and prior to social conventions. This priority exists analytically as well as phenomenologically. In order to exemplify this prior character of acts of meaning, I retrieve Antigone’s experiential knowledge in Sophocles’ Antigone. Antigone’s unwritten laws are characterized by an absence of mediating concepts. I then identify several elements of an act of meaning in an unwritten language: the experiential body as the source of the acts of meaning, praeiudicia (prejudgements), collective memories, the act character of meaning, and the act of interpretation of social behaviour. My final section raises the prospect of whether humanrights can be considered universal if acts of meaning are that important in the identity of a law. (shrink)
Many scholars and activists favor banning illicit businesses, especially given that such businesses constitute a large part of the global economy. But these businesses are commonly operated as if they are subject only to the ethical norms their management chooses to recognize, and as a result they sometimes harm innocent people. This can happen in part because there are no effective legal constraints on illicit businesses, and in part because it seems theoretically impossible to dispose definitively of arguments that support (...) moral relativism. Progress is being made, however, towards a “second best” arrangement consisting of widespread institutional agreements regarding ethical norms. This development might eventually enable us to transcend moral relativism in some respects. Indeed, although some business ethicists who examine illicit business practices accept moral relativism, others attempt to surmount it. The latters’ endeavor, I show, is cross-cultural in nature in that it involves businesses that are deemed illicit in at least one but not every culture. I then recall some traditional solutions and their limits: ideological teachings are culture-specific, hence both temporally and spatially limited; legal constraints, though potentially helpful, are too diverse hence often narrow in reach. Especially problematic are defense industry businesses, which are inherently transcultural and, though uniquely harmful, are not effectively banned in any culture. Harm to quality of life (QoL) can, however, be measured. So I recommend institutional support for international humanrights tied to QoL data as a workable way to counter moral relativism regarding illicit businesses. (shrink)
International humanrights law is profoundly oxymoronic. Certain well-known international treaties claim a universal character for humanrights, but international tribunals often interpret and enforce these either narrowly or, if widely, they rely upon sovereign states to enforce the rights against themselves. International lawyers and diplomats have usually tried to resolve the apparent contradiction by pressing for more general rules in the form of treaties, legal doctrines, and institutional procedures. Despite such efforts, aliens remain who (...) are neither legal nor illegal and who thereby slip through a discourse that claims universality. I ask, why does international legal discourse claim a universality of humanrights enforceable by impartial, politically neutral tribunals when it also recognises that a state may refuse to recognise some groups as “persons”? I turn to the works of Bernhard Waldenfels for an explanation. To that end, I briefly outline two examples of state-centered humanrights treaties. I then reconstruct Waldenfels’ explanation as to how a territorial sense of space needs an alien exterior to the space. The territorial structure assumes time is frozen as of the date of the foundation of the structure. The body of the alien is taken as a biological body. The personality, motives, and actions of the alien are the consequence of the imagination of people inside the territorial boundary. The dominant international legal discourse reinforces and institutionalises such a territorial sense of space and frozen time because the territorial state is considered the primary legal subject of international law. I also retrieve, however, an experiential but concealed sense of space and time. To retrieve this sense of space and time requires that lawyers see the world through the twilight of legality heretofore ignored as pre-legal. (shrink)
Care is more than dispensing pills or cleaning beds. It is about responding to the entire patient. What is called “bedside manner” in medical personnel is a quality of treating the patient not as a mechanism but as a being—much like the caregiver—with desires, ideas, dreams, aspirations, and the gamut of mental and emotional character. As automata, answering an increasing functional need in care, are designed to enact care, the pressure is on their becoming more humanlike to carry out the (...) function more effectively. The question becomes not merely whether the care automaton can effect good bedside manner but whether the patient’s response is not feeling deceived by the humanlikeness. It seems the device must be designed either to effect explicit mere human-“likeness,” thus likely undermining its bedside-manner potential, or to fool the patient completely. Neither option is attractive. This article examines the social problems of designing maximally humanlike care automata and how problems may start to erode the humanrights of users/patients. The article then investigates the alternatives for dealing with this problem, whether by industrial and professional self-regulation or public-policy initiatives. It then frames the problem in the broader historical perspective in terms of previous bans, moratoria, and other means of control of hazardous and potentially rights-violating techniques and materials. (shrink)
Can there be a "reflexive" or presuppositional, reasonably non-rejectable grounding of a Forst-type right to justification, or of a meaningful form of constitutive discursive standing? The paper argues that this is not so, and this for reasons that reflect more general limitations of presuppositional arguments for relevantly contested conclusions. To this end, the paper critically engages Forst's "reflexive" argument for humanrights. It also considers O'Neill's presuppositional attempt to defend a form of cosmopolitanism, as well as the attempt (...) to anchor constructivist conclusions in the meaning of the word "reasonable". (shrink)
The democratic surprises of 2016—Brexit and the Trump phenomenon—fueled by “fake news”, both real and imagined, have come to constitute a centrifugal, nationalistic, even tribal moment in politics. Running counter to the shared postwar narrative of increasing internationalism, these events reignited embers of cultural and moral relativism in academia and public discourse dormant since the culture wars of the 1990s and ‘60s. This counternarrative casts doubt on the value of belief in universal humanrights, which many in the (...) humanities and social sciences argue have of late been used as instruments of postcolonial oppression. This book essay introduces three texts written before the dawn of the latest “post-truth” era—The Sociology of HumanRights by Mark Frezzo, The Political Sociology of HumanRights by Kate Nash, and Keeping Faith with HumanRights by Linda Hogan—that address moral skepticism of humanrights. Along with these authors, the essay briefly treats humanrights’ past and prospects, analogizing it to the waves of feminist thought: in international politics, developing nations first desired a seat at the table and repeal of discriminatory laws and practices; when one-nation-one-vote did not result in equal treatment, the persistence of hierarchy helped developing nations awaken to their own evolving national identities and they wished to be recognized as not only equal, but different and unique. The essay recapitulates and amplifies these authors’ argument that the contemporary challenge for all nations, their citizens, and for the humanrights community is to deliberatively decide what values unite these identities beyond simple self-determination and extend them toward the goal of a just global whole. The essay also makes an original contribution in summarizing the initial post-war debate in the United Nations that birthed the 1948 Declaration of HumanRights, which has been subject to revisionism and perspectivism typical of cultural and moral relativism. It provides some social scientific, historical, and philosophic grounding for serious conversation of the ideas of truths in politics, and universal, transcultural goods and rights that underpin the authority of the international humanrights regime in theory and practice. It does so while recognizing the serious epistemological challenges to this universalist conception, chiefly: how a social construct can be both time-bound human creation and continue to be morally binding across space, time, and the accelerated change global citizens of all corners are experiencing, simultaneously yet in their own way. (shrink)
Charles Beitz has presented us with a new and novel theory of humanrights, one that is motivated by a concern for the enforcement of humanrights in modern international practice. However, the focus on states in his humanrights project generates a tension between the universal aspirations of individual humanrights and the vulnerable individuals who through rendition or state failure find themselves outside the international state system. This paper argues that (...) Beitz and other theorists of humanrights make a mistake when they define humanrights in statist terms. The scope of a theory of humanrights must include all human beings, even if not simply in virtue of their humanity. The aspiration for humanrights to be political and not metaphysical is interesting and admirable, but the human scope of humanrights must be retained in order for humanrights to retain their critical force. (shrink)
The concept of the person is widely assumed to be indispensable for making a rights claim. But a survey of the concept's appearance in legal discourse reveals that the concept is stretched to the breaking point. Personhood stands at the center of debates as diverse as the legal status of embryos and animals to the rights and responsibilities of corporations and nations. This Note argues that personhood is a cluster concept with distinct components: the biological concept of the (...)human being, the notion of a rational agent, and unity of consciousness. Use of these component concepts (in lieu of the concept of the person) in legal reasoning would promote greater systematicity and coherence. (shrink)
With the advancement of artificial intelligence and humanoid robotics and an ongoing debate between humanrights and rule of law, moral philosophers, legal and political scientists are facing difficulties to answer the questions like, “Do humanoid robots have same rights as of humans and if these rights are superior to humanrights or not and why?” This paper argues that the sustainability of humanrights will be under question because, in near future (...) the scientists (considerably the most rational people) will be the biggest critics of the humanrights. Whereas to make artificial intelligence sustainable, it is very important to reconcile it with humanrights. Above all, there is a need to find a consensus between humanrights and robotics rights in the framework of our established legal systems. (shrink)
Th e contemporary right to freedom of thought together with all its further declinations into freedom of speech, religion, conscience and expression, had one of its earliest historical recognitions at the end of the Wars of Religion with the Edict of Nantes (1598). In several respects one can saythat the right to freedom of thought is virtually “co-original” with the endof the Wars of Religion. Following this thought further, one might think that humanrights defi ne the boundaries (...) of our social coexistence and are inextricably connected to the “fact” of cultural pluralism. (shrink)
Poverty, Agency, and HumanRights collects thirteen new essays that analyze how human agency relates to poverty and humanrights respectively as well as how agency mediates issues concerning poverty and social and economic humanrights. No other collection of philosophical papers focuses on the diverse ways poverty impacts the agency of the poor, the reasons why poverty alleviation schemes should also promote the agency of beneficiaries, and the fitness of the human (...)rights regime to secure both economic development and free agency. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 considers the diverse meanings of poverty both from the standpoint of the poor and from that of the relatively well-off. Part 2 examines morally appropriate responses to poverty on the part of persons who are better-off and powerful institutions. Part 3 identifies economic development strategies that secure the agency of the beneficiaries. Part 4 addresses the constraints poverty imposes on agency in the context of biomedical research, migration for work, and trafficking in persons. (shrink)
Create an account to enable off-campus access through your institution's proxy server.
Monitor this page
Be alerted of all new items appearing on this page. Choose how you want to monitor it:
Email
RSS feed
About us
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.