Universal Declaration of Human Rights 70th anniversary is been celebrated in 2018. On the other hand, people are still arguing about the political, juridical, social and civilizational gains it has provided. Such discussions, however, focus on peripheral aspects of Human Rights, losing sight of what could be understood as its highest normative gain. Whenever arguments are not completely rectified, they dissociate from the social demands that actually gave them meaning and relevance. From this scope, the article intends to reconstruct the (...) conceptual and argumentative aspects of Human Rights from the critical theory of relations of justification by Rainer Forst, in which Human Rights are interpreted as arising from a fundamental right to justification. This fundamental right, in Forst’s theory, is interpreted as being part of the “deep grammar” of social conflicts. According to the Forstian theory, we argue for an interpretation of Human Rights capable of encompassing the multiple aspects of these rights, avoiding reductionism and unilateral interpretations of it. This presentation has been divided into three parts. First, it presented some traditional “pictures”, current forms of referring to Human Rights and its characteristics, against which another picture will be proposed, in order to place social conflicts and rejections of injustice as a starting point for the Human Rights. Next, the Forst’s principle of justification and the recursive argument that led toit was discussed. Finally, a critical interpretation of the Forstian proposal, which dealtwith the purposes that his theory is allegedly seeking, was carried out. (shrink)

In contrast to China’s efforts to upgrade its system of governance around a stupefying amount of data collection and electronic scoring, countries committed to democracy and human rights did not upgrade their systems. Instead, those countries ended up with surveillance capitalism. It is vital for the survival of those ideas about governance to perform such an upgrade. This paper aims to contribute to that goal. I propose a framework of epistemic actorhood in terms of four roles and characterize digital lifeworlds (...) and what matters about them both in terms of how they fit in with Max Tegmark’s distinctions among stages of life and in terms of how they generate their own episteme, the data episteme, with its immense possibilities of infopower. Epistemic rights that strengthen existing human rights – as part of a fourth generation of rights – are needed to protect epistemic actorhood in those roles. In the long run, we might well need a new kind of right, the right to the exercise of genuinely human intelligence. (shrink)

The article deals with `The Symbolic Force of Human Rights'. First, it restricts the meaning of the term `symbolic' and of the expression `symbolic force'. Second, it discusses the concept of human rights. Having established the conceptual framework, the author goes to the core of his argument, characterizing the symbolic force of human rights as ambivalent: on one hand, it serves for their generalized affirmation and accomplishment; on the other hand, it acts as a manner of political manipulation. In this (...) regard, the article focuses, first, on the symbolic force of human rights at the level of national states, and then within the international and worldwide context, on criticizing finally the rhetorical use of human rights by nowadays' only superpower, the USA. Key Words: human rights • interventionism • supranational and national • legal orders • symbolic force. (shrink)

The first part of the paper focuses on the current debate over the universality of human rights. After conceptually distinguishing between different types of universality, it employs Sen’s definition that the claim of a universal value is the one that people anywhere may have reason to see as valuable. When applied to human rights, this standard implies “thin” (relative, contingent) universality, which might be operationally worked-out as in Donnelly’s three-tiered scheme of concepts–conceptions–implementations. The second part is devoted to collective rights, (...) which have recently become a new topic of the human rights debate. This part provides the basis of political–philosophical justification and legal–theoretical conceptualization of collective rights, as rights directly vested in collective entities. The third part dwells on the problem of universality of collective rights. It differentiates between the three main collective entities in international law—peoples, minorities, and indigenous peoples—and investigates whether certain rights vested in these collectives might, according to Sen’s standard, acquire the status of the universal ones. After determining that some rights are, in principle, plausible candidates for such a status in international law, this paper concludes by taking notice of a number of the open issues that still need to be settled, primarily by the cooperative endeavor of international legal scholars and legal theorists. (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)

The overall aim of the article is to analyse how the universal right to education have been built, legitimized and used. And more specifically ask who is addressed by the universal right to education, and who is given access to rights and to education. The first part of the article focus on the history of declarations, the notion of the universal right to education, emphasizing differences in matters of detail—for example, the meaning of ‘compulsory’, ‘children’s rights’ or ‘parents’ rights’—and critically (...) examining the right of the child and the right of the parent in terms of tensions between ‘social rights’ and ‘private autonomy rights’. Despite differences in detail, the iterations of the universal right to education do share to the full in the idea of education as such. In the second part the attempt to scrutinize the underlying assumptions legitimizing the consensus on education, focusing again on the notion of the child. In conclusion I argue that a certain notion of what it is to be a human being is inscribed within the circle of access to rights and education. These notions of what it means to be a child, a parent, a citizen or a member of the ‘human family’ are notions of enlightenment and humanity and, to my understanding, aspects of how democracy is configured around freedom, equality and fraternity. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical analysis of two central issues in Luigi Ferrajoli’s Principia iuris , and more generally of his theory of rights. One is the way in which ‘expectations’ play a crucial role in his deontic theory by establishing the logical basis for his guarantee-based conception of law and rights. The axiomatic way in which Ferrajoli arrives at his conception of fundamental rights is questioned, for it fails to give a full account of the nature of subjective rights. (...) The other issues discussed here is Ferrajoli’s own defence of the universality of fundamental rights, and how this is made to depend on a ‘normative technique’ that one can associate with legal discourse and modern law in Western societies. This, however, poses the problem of how this formal universalism can be reconciled with the intercultural dialogue that Ferrajoli also advocates. (shrink)

This article argues for a realist conception of human needs. By ‘realist’ we mean that certain fundamental needs are categorically distinct from consumer wants, holding independently of people's subjective beliefs as objective life requirements. These basic needs, we contend, are baseline measures of social justice in the sense that no society that does not prioritise their satisfaction can be legitimate. The paper concludes with a comprehensive response to seven core objections to our position.