This article examines the moral, political and pedagogical tensions that are created from the entanglement of patriotism and human rights, and sketches a response to these tensions in the context of critical education. The article begins with a brief review of different forms of patriotism, especially as those relate to human rights, and explains why some of these forms may be morally or politically valuable. Then, it offers a brief overview of human rights critiques, especially from the perspectives of Foucault, (...) critical legal studies and postcolonial theory, and emphasizes that foundationalist perspectives of human rights need to be constantly contested. The next part of the article discusses how to overcome issues of incompatibility between patriotism and human rights. The final part proposes that a ‘rapprochement’ between patriotism and human rights in the context of critical education has to take into consideration that patriotic feelings (as a form of love for one’s country) constitute a particular form of ‘emotional education’. As such, the teaching of both patriotism and human rights would benefit from the notion of ‘critical pedagogies of emotion’ that interrogates the emotional commitments of patriotism and human rights and the consequences of these commitments. (shrink)

This paper addresses one of the challenges in human rights education concerning the conceptualization of a pedagogical orientation that avoids both the pitfalls of a purely juridical address and a ‘cheap sentimental’ approach. The paper uses as its point of departure Richard Rorty’s key intervention on human rights discourse and argues that a more critical orientation of Rorty’s proposal on ‘sentimental education’ has important implications for HRE. This orientation is not limited to perspectives such as Rorty’s voyeuristic approach to sentimentality, (...) but rather focuses explicitly on the emotional and political consequences of various manifestations of sentimentality. Such an orientation in HRE will not only encourage learners to become more sympathetic to the living realities of those who suffer, but it will also interrogate the conditions of hearing narratives of suffering so that possibilities for cheap sentimentality are minimized as much as possible. (shrink)

The present essay discusses the value of citizenship as shared fate in sites of ethnic conflict and analyzes its implications for citizenship education in light of three issues: first, the requirements of affective relationality in the notion of citizenship-as-shared fate; second, the tensions between the values of human rights and shared fate in sites of ethnic conflict; and third, the ways in which citizenship education might overcome these tensions without falling into the trap of psychologization and instrumentalization, but rather focusing (...) on providing opportunities for social and school practices that manifest shared fate and compassion in critical ways. It is argued that what teachers and schools should try to do is to make practices of shared fate and compassion possible through creating conditions for children and young people to experience what it means to enact such practices in sites of ethnic conflict. It is also suggested that teachers and schools in sites of ethnic conflict cannot produce ‘new’ citizens on the basis of any values, no matter how ‘noble’ these values may be. The most that can be done is to help children and young people to critically reflect upon the conditions under which people in sites of ethnic conflict can act on the basis of shared fate and compassion and provide support so that these possibilities can become realistic. (shrink)

There is a recent interest in the ethics of high-skilled worker emigration through which the limitations of the right to exit are discussed. Insightful arguments have been made in favour of the emigration restrictions on skilled workers in order to tackle the deprivations in developing countries. However, there is still a need for clarification on how we can understand, discuss and implement limitations of a right from a normative perspective. Significantly, how we understand the limitation of a right might determine (...) how we approach such limitations – both in terms of the process of assessing the limitations and in terms of their implications. In this paper, I identify two distinct ways to understand limitations of the right to exit with respect to losses associated with health worker emigration, while also pointing to their implications for restrictive policies: as a matter of scope, and as a matter of weight or emergency, which requires a compensatory scheme for the individual right holders. While the emergency restrictions seem to be a point of convergence in the literature, what defines an emergency and the nature of the compensation still warrant exploration. To that end, I also discuss from a normative perspective what might constitute a public emergency that would give states a prima facie prerogative to regulate temporary limitations on the exercise of the right to exit. In addition, I briefly introduce the implications of emergency restrictions, with a particular focus on compensatory schemes for individual right holders. (shrink)

Social media platforms have been vested with hope for their potential to enable ‘ordinary citizens’ to make their judgments public and contribute to pluralized discussions about organizations and their perceived legitimacy :60–97, 2018). This raises questions about how ordinary citizens make judgements and voice them in online spaces. This paper addresses these questions by examining how Western citizens ascribe responsibility and action in relation to corporate misconduct. Empirically, it focuses on modern slavery and analyses online debates in Denmark on child (...) slavery in the cocoa industry. Conceptually, it introduces the notion of cosmopolitanism as a general disposition of care and responsibility towards distant others, conceived as a prerequisite for the critical evaluation of corporate responsibility in the Global South. The analysis of online debates shows that citizens debate child slavery in terms of individual consumer responsibility rather than corporate responsibility. Corporations are not considered potential agents of change. As a consequence, online citizen debates did not reflect a legitimacy crisis for the cocoa industry, as debates over responsibility were overwhelmingly concerned with the agency of the Western individual, the individual agency of the speakers themselves. Participants in debates understood their agency strictly as consumer agency. (shrink)

El artículo se pregunta qué sentido tiene la práctica de conferir o reconocer derechos y sostiene que son sus consecuencias lo que nos interesa y lo que hace sensata la práctica relacionada con ellos. La virtud de esta tesis es que permite aterrizar el vocabulario aéreo de los derechos y que invita a determinar sus contenidos específicos con la mayor precisión posible. Se trata de una tesis realista y pragmatista respecto de los derechos. Realista, porque busca comprender en qué consiste (...) realmente ser titular de derechos; pragmatista, en la medida en que, para hacerlo, se interesa por las consecuencias de su titularidad. El artículo busca también mostrar el modo en que una tesis pragmatista sobre los derechos puede dar cuenta de los derechos fundamentales. (shrink)

This article undertakes a critical examination of the political philosophy of Richard Rorty with special reference to his treatment of patriotism, pragmatism and democracy. Pragmatism, especially in the work of John Dewey, provided an energetic defence of American democracy, claiming that American democratic culture did not require any philosophical lessons from European social theory. American pragmatism is in this sense a celebration of indigenous political traditions. In his defence of pragmatism and patriotism against the cosmopolitanism of Left cultural critics, Rorty (...) advocates pragmatic ethnocentrism. Through a parallel commentary on socialist internationalism, this article asks whether ‘democracy in one country’ - the United States of America - is either feasible or compatible with the critical legacy of pragmatism. In its response to the growth of international terrorism, especially in its ‘liberation of Iraq’, the United States is in danger of becoming a ‘predatory democracy’. While Rorty has in the past argued that America cannot function as a global policeman, the trend of contemporary international relations is to create an American Empire. The article concludes by arguing that Rorty’s patriotism functions as ‘a final vocabulary’ that contradicts his postmodernism and makes it difficult for modern pragmatism to remain a critical theory. (shrink)

Judith Shklar’s dictum, ‘the worst evil of cruelty’, is well known. What this means for her political theory and how such theory is construed are rarely explored. This article maintains that Shklar’s turn towards cruelty/suffering has a specific role in the development of her political argument. It allows her both to curb her long-standing skepticism, and to use it creatively. This is because suffering must be examined from the perspectives of history and philosophy, which produce two sets of knowledge, each (...) limiting the overbearing tendencies of the other. The way Shklar uses the tension between history and philosophy for progressive purposes, and her idea that politics can mediate between history and philosophy, makes her a very contemporary theorist, similar to those who critically engage foundationalism without wanting to dispose of it completely. Approaching Shklar’s ‘Putting Cruelty First’ through her engagement with history and philosophy, and making use of the concepts of ‘realism’ and ‘weak ontology’ to do so are a more productive route to understanding her dictum than the usual one of examining it through the prism of her ‘liberalism of fear’. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of the role of conscience in the justification of human rights. I argue that in both the western tradition of natural rights and the non-western traditions, human rights are justified, in part, because of their appeal to conscience, and not simply because they issue from a divine source or are based on reason. In contrast, contemporary justifications of human rights primarily look for an objective foundation or simply assert the pragmatic importance of human rights as (...) their justification. While there are distinct advantages to this way of arguing, there are also problems, which I will discuss. As an alternative, I outline Arendt's understanding of conscience as the ability to be with and think with one's self as a secular alternative to both a non-secular version of conscience, and the denial of conscience implicit in contemporary theories. Her view of political judgment helps us to understand how conscience can be understood as subjective but not arbitrary. This paper brings Arendt's insights on conscience and judgment to bear on contemporary discourses of human rights. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Louis Pojman fails to justify his conception of a moderate cosmopolitan world government. I illustrate this by highlighting the fact that Pojman fails to articulate adequate justifications for his Principle of Humanity (POH) and Principle of Equality (POE). This is problematic because the POH and POE ground his conception of human rights, which, in turn, grounds his conception of a moderate cosmopolitan world government. Hence, since he fails to justify the POH and the POE, (...) I conclude that his conception of a cosmopolitan world government ultimately fails. But, before I launch this attack on Pojman, I offer substantial philosophical analyses of Hobbes's arguments for the state of nature, human rights, and the establishment of the commonwealth. I do so because Hobbes provides the philosophical basis for Pojman's philosophy of world government. I show that by understanding the philosophical problems inherent in Hobbes we gain better understanding of the philosophical problems at the basis of Pojman. (shrink)

The new dilemmas and responsibilities which arise in bioethics both because of the unprecedented pace of scientific development and of growing moral pluralism are more and more difficult to grapple with. At the ‘global’ level, the call for the universal nature at least of some fundamental moral values and principles is often being contended as a testament of arrogance, if not directly as a new kind of subtler imperialism. The human rights framework itself, which provided the basis for the most (...) relevant international declarations and documents, is not exempt from the charge. However, the refusal of a top-down conception of the universal as a sort of product for exportation should not be confused with a relativistic landscape, where all the cows can be indifferently black or white. This contribution aims at outlining an approach, which reconciles universalism as enshrined in founding human rights declarations with respect for cultural diversity. In order to do so, two conceptual frameworks are discussed: the ‘tool-kit’ model and the morals/ethics difference. The example of the right to quality health care confirms the argument that striking a balance between cherishing pluralism and defending some fundamental rights and obligations does not amount to an assertion of moral imperialism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhism and the Idea of Human Rights:Resonances and Dissonances1Perry Schmidt-LeukelIn 1991 L.P.N. Perera, Professor of Pāli and Buddhist Studies in Sri Lanka, published a Buddhist commentary on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In this commentary Perera tries to show that, in the Pāli canon, i.e. the canonical scripture of Theravāda Buddhism, for every single article of the Human Rights Declaration a substantial parallel or at least a statement (...) with a similar tendency can be found. Indeed, says Perera, Article 1, which affirms the dignity and rights of all humans, "is in complete accord with Buddhist thought, and may be said to be nothing new to Buddhism in conception" (Perera 1991:21). In contrast, the Buddhist Peter Junger, Professor of Law at the University of Cleveland, Ohio, judged in 1995 that... though followers of Buddhist traditions do value most, if not all, of the interests underlying the rhetoric of human rights, they may not have much use for the label itself, which is, after all, a product of the traditions of Western Europe and the parochial histories of that region.(Junger 1998: 56)Junger goes on to say that "the concept of human rights is not likely to be useful in...following the Buddha Dharma" (Junger 1998: 55).Thus Perera and Junger agree that the content of the various human rights is acceptable for Buddhists. However, they disagree strongly in their evaluation of the idea of human rights in itself. In this respect Damien Keown has rightly argued that the crucial question on 'Buddhism and Human Rights' is not so much whether Buddhism can accept any particular human right but rather whether the idea of human rights as such can find a philosophical justification within the "overall Buddhist vision of individual and social good" (Keown 1998: 24).It is this problem that I would like to pursue in this paper. In the first part I will sketch some basic characteristics of the idea of human rights. In the second part I will point out what resonances this idea finds in Buddhism or by which Buddhist concepts the human rights idea can be justified. And finally, in the third part, I will deal [End Page 33] with the question of potential dissonances between the idea of human rights and Buddhist concepts.On the Nature of Human RightsWith the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the various subsequent human rights conventions the rights of individuals were for the first time inscribed into international law, which had previously recognised only collectives as legal subjects. By formulating universal rights as valid for every individual human being regardless of race, colour, sex, religion, birth, etc. the Universal Declaration points to the most important feature of the idea of human rights: the protection of the individual or, to be more precise, the protection of the individual against powerful institutions of the state, society, religion or others. It is individual self-determination and free agency that are protected through human rights. Human rights define the minimum of what is necessary in order to guarantee the freedom of individual agency and the freedom of self-determination. By the definition of inalienable rights,2 the idea of human rights sets limits to those collectives and institutions in which we usually live, limits which for the sake of the basic liberty of the individual are not to be transgressed. Michael Ignatieff summarises this understanding of human rights with the words: "rights exist to protect individuals" (Ignatieff 2001: 67), and "they are worth having only if they can be enforced against institutions like the family, the state, and the church" (Ignatieff 2001: 66f.). Therefore "moral individualism" is "the core of the Universal Declaration" (Ignatieff 2001: 66).It is true that the further development of the human rights debate, particularly within the context of the United Nations, has led to an extension of the idea of human rights to collective rights and collective legal entities by including among human rights, for example, a nations' right to self-determination and the right to peace and the right to development. However, in my opinion it would be highly... (shrink)

Drawing from recent advocacy efforts on the right to education in Kenya, this article argues that linking human rights to local political struggles is a useful way of ensuring their realization. Human rights are legal and moral but their realization is a political project. The form that this project takes will differ from context to context. While paying due regard to the remarkable contribution of international human rights regimes and transnational advocacy of the last fifty years in providing the world (...) with a powerful legal and moral vocabulary of rights, this article suggests that this vocabulary risks losing its edge unless those working in the field of human rights recognize the necessity of local politics. The article examines the activities of the Kenyan human rights movement and its strategic linking of access to basic education with repression of political freedoms. (shrink)

This paper examines the effects of non-derogability status for seven human rights during declared states of emergency from 1996 to 2004 in 195 countries. For this purpose, we create several original measures of countries’ state of emergency status. Our analysis finds the intended protections from the special legal status of non-derogable rights to be anemic, at best, during declared emergencies. This finding begs a reconsideration of both the utility of the “non-derogable” categorization in both international and municipal law, and the (...) conditions under which declared states of emergency might be justified. (shrink)

This paper will explore the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an exemplar of political mythmaking, a genre of narrative designed to channel and thereby to quell social anxiety and to orient select groups toward desirable beliefs and practices. One of the Declaration’s most fundamental and forceful elements is its enshrinement of the “inherent dignity” of each member of the human family. Drawing upon contemporary theorizations of mythmaking and sacralization, this article will elucidate the manner in which inherent dignity (...) functions as the central item of sacredness within what we might call the “secular morality” of universal human rights. (shrink)

A dialogical approach to understanding Islamic ethics rejects objectivist methods in favor of a conversational model in which participants accept each other as rational moral agents. Hans-Georg Gadamer asserts the importance of agreement upon a subject matter through conversation as a means to gaining insight into other persons and cultures, and Jürgen Habermas stresses the importance of fairness in dialogue. Using human rights as a subject matter for engaging in dialogue with Islamic scholars, Muslim perspectives on issues such as democracy, (...) toleration, and freedom of conscience emerge. A capabilities approach to human rights, such as that developed by Martha Nussbaum, enables the coexistence of multiple religious ethical visions while insisting upon the need to protect and nurture essential human abilities. (shrink)

This article examines post-9/11 efforts by Western governments to instill respect for human rights among the world’s Muslim populations. The article argues that Western discourses on human rights are best conceptualized as a hegemonic Bourdieusian distinction strategy. In a dynamic strategy of this type, new human rights norms are continually produced and subverted by liberal elites in the West. Because these norms are constantly evolving, Muslim social practices can never “catch up” to them. This produces a perpetual distinction between a (...) progressive liberal Occident and a backwards illiberal Orient, justifying the perpetual hegemony of the former over the latter. In developing its analysis, the article gives special attention to right-wing nationalist movements in Europe and the USA and US foreign policy in the Middle East. These developments are situated in relationship to liberal imperialism in the Colonial era, the Global War on Terrorism, and recent concerns over immigration. (shrink)

In the lexicon of rights, the concept ofhumanrights can play a wide variety of roles. Human rights can be defined as substantive natural rights that transcend politics and culture or as the rights that underlie political and cultural differences. They can be defined narrowly as rights that could be asserted against enemies in war or, more broadly, as the aspirational goals to which governments are held accountable by their citizens and the world. Despite their lack of recognition in covenant and (...) positive law through much of the twentieth century, human rights are increasingly asserted on the basis of such recognition. To some, human rights are simply the sine qua non (procedural? biological?) for asserting other rights, whatever these may be. In this paper I do not choose among these uses of the concept of human rights by propounding a single definition; neither do I defend or criticize human rights in general. (shrink)

The critique of human rights has proliferated in critical legal thinking over recent years, making it clear that we can no longer uncritically approach human rights in their liberal form. In this article I assert that after the critique of rights one way human rights may be productively re-engaged in radical politics is by drawing from the radical democratic tradition. Radical democratic thought provides plausible resources to rework the shortcomings of liberal human rights, and allows human rights to be brought (...) within the purview of a wider political project adopting a critical approach to current relations of power. Building upon previous re-engagements with rights using radical democratic thought, I return to the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to explore how human rights may be thought as an antagonistic hegemonic activity within a critical relation to power, a concept which is fundamentally futural, and may emerge as one site for work towards radical and plural democracy. I also assert, via Judith Butler’s model of cultural translation, that a radical democratic practice of human rights may be advanced which resonates with and builds upon already existing activism, thereby holding possibilities to persuade those who remain sceptical as to radical re-engagements with rights. (shrink)

Recent histories of human rights have shown that the turn to human rights as a form of politics occurred as a placeholder for utopian energies at the end of history, coinciding with a retreat of the organised left, the abandonment of the theme of revolution, and the pluralisation of political struggles. This essay examines the way that radical continental theory has responded to the political hegemony of human rights by focusing on ‘post-Marxist’ thought. Examining the work of four influential critics (...) of human rights—Claude Lefort, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Rancière—I argue that post-Marxist thought provides two very different approaches to the political possibilities offered by human rights. The first retains a fidelity to the revolutionary critique of rights by rejecting the language and conceptuality of human rights as too deeply implicated in the liberal political order that needs to be resisted. The second acknowledges the limitations of human rights while arguing that they also offer important tools for democratic political struggle. The essay draws upon these analyses to consider the contemporary political meaning of human rights. It argues that the latter of these strategies is problematic because we now face a radically different political conjuncture to the one in which the politics of human rights first emerged: human rights have played an important role in the project of post-historical reaction; the political space in which the politics of rights once made sense has collapsed; and we have seen substantial political upheavals in the wake of the crisis of capitalism. (shrink)

A fines de 2017, Gustavo Zagrebelky, lanza un ataque radicalmente duro a los derechos fundamentales y plantea la pregunta desorientadora: “si las injusticias y los males del mundo son una violación o una consecuencia de los derechos”. A partir de aquí y de su solicitación para “una jurisprudencia que [ponga] en relación las reivindicaciones de los derechos con el problema de la justicia”, este trabajo se enfoca en las dificultades específicas que hoy condicionan la conjugación de derecho y justicia dentro (...) de las coordenadas de los principios del constitucionalismo nacional y, en particular, de su principio fundante de la tutela y implementación de los derechos fundamentales. En particular, para aclarar y justificar la respuesta que se dará en conclusión a la “pregunta desorientadora” de Zagrebelsky, primero se especificará en que sentido es plausible afirmar que el proyecto político y jurídico del constitucionalismo nacional identifica los términos para una conjugación inédita de justicia y derecho, y luego se dirigirá la atención a las dificultades con las cuales la jurisdicción nacional se enfrenta cuando quiere atenerse al principio fundante del constitucionalismo nacional de la tutela y implementación de los derechos fundamentales. (shrink)

This essay describes the author's change of approach to the comparative study of religious ethics from the one contained in a book on the subject, published in 1978. The change resulted from interactions with Abdulaziz Sachedina, the noted scholar of Islam, demonstrating the importance of comparing different ethical systems in reference to global topics like human rights, particularly the right to freedom of conscience.

In the course of presenting a compelling and comprehensive framework for immigration justice, Brock addresses discriminatory immigration policies, focusing on recent attempts by the Trump administration to exclude Muslims from the U.S.. This essay critically assesses Brock’s treatment of the issue, and in particular the question of what made the Muslim ban and similar policies unjust. Through examining these issues, further questions regarding the immigration justice framework on offer arise.

Journal of Global Ethics, Volume 9, Issue 3, Page 293-310, December 2013.

This paper is a critical examination of a widely accepted method of human rights justification. The method defends the universality of human rights by appeal to diverse worldviews that converge on human rights norms. By showing that the norms can be justified from the perspective of diverse worldviews, human rights theorists suggest that there is reason to believe that human rights are universal norms that should govern the institutions of all societies. This paper argues that the evidence of plural foundations (...) of human rights fails to increase our confidence in the universality of human rights. The paper defends the following claims: (1) the convergence on human rights is better explained as an accidental outcome than as an indicator of the universality of human rights, (2) the plurality of human rights justification is superfluous to the explanation of why human rights apply to all societies, (3) the aggregation of justifications decreases rather than increases the reliability of the universality belief, and (4) the reasonable disagreement among conflicting justifications generates an epistemic dilemma. (shrink)

This paper investigates the construction of social identity in Israeli historian of religion Gershom Scholem's letter to American political theorist Hannah Arendt in the wake of the Eichmann trial. The paper asks, first, whether Arendt is depicted as a natural insider or a moral outsider of the relevant human community and what this construction entails as to the nature of the group itself. And second, what the relationship may be between members of the group and the universal demand of writing (...) about the Holocaust in a morally just way. In pursuing these issues, it is suggested that Scholem's ultimate account as to Arendt's subject position is that of the Jewish anti-Semite: a person who is Jewish but by her acts effectively renounces this position. The closing parts of the paper analyse the implications of the letter and the resulting relationship constructed between the political tradition of Judaism and that of liberalism. (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)

Recent literature on the ‘exclusions’ of the modern nation-state has missed a major transformation in the legitimate mode of excluding, from group to individual-based. This transformation is explored in a discussion of universalistic trends in contemporary Western states’ immigration and citizenship policies. Conflicting with the notion of a ‘nation-state’ owned by a particular ethnic group or nation, these trends are better captured in terms of a ‘liberal state’ that has self-limited its sovereign prerogatives by constitutional principles of equality and individual (...) rights. (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)

Dialogue with three major Muslim authors shows that Islam can take a positive stance toward human rights while also presenting differing interpretations of the meaning and scope of rights. Because of their subordination of norms reached through reason to those drawn from faith, as well as negative experiences of the impact of Western colonization of parts of the Muslim world, Abul A‘la Maududi and Sayyid Qutb place significant restrictions on rights of conscience. 'Abdolkarim Soroush's positive support for the role of (...) reason in Islamic faith and his less-negative assessment of the West lead him to more vigorous support for the human rights agenda. This study raises the question of whether the humility needed in comparative ethics and the respect for others at the root of human rights are necessarily linked. (shrink)

This paper grapples with Bernard Williams’s prima vista enigmatic assertion that ‘[w]hether it is a matter of good philosophical sense to treat a practice as a violation of human rights, and whether it is politically good sense, cannot ultimately constitute two separate questions’. Though Williams’s approach to thinking about human rights has a number of affinities with other ‘political’ and ‘minimalist’ understandings, we highlight its distinctive features and argue that it has significant implications for our understanding of human rights along (...) a number of key dimensions. We then proceed to explain how Williams’s way of thinking about human rights coheres with certain aspects of the reasoning of one of the most important international human rights courts, to wit, the European Court of Human Rights. This lends further plausibility to the view that a politically realistic understanding of human rights, of the kind urged by Williams, should be taken seriously, since it is a plausible candidate for the explanation of important aspects of human rights practices. We close by examining the suggestion that thinking in these terms is worryingly conservative. (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)

In the age of globalization, and increased interdependence in the world that we face today, there is a question we may have to raise: Do we need and could we attain a world government, capable of insuring the peace and facilitating worldwide well-being in a just and efficient manner? In the twenty chapters of this book, some of the most prominent living philosophers give their consideration to this question in a provocative and engaging way. Their essays are not only of (...) wide theoretical interest but also provide a thought-provoking approach to this most timely and urgent issue. A wide range of perspectives are represented here. -/- The authors include Richard Falk, Michael Walzer, Thomas Pogge, Larry May, Alfred Rubin, Stanley Hoffman, Jan Narveson, Virginia Held, Pauline Kleingeld and Luis Cabrera. Jovan Babic is Professor of Ethics at the University of Belgrade and Visiting Professor at Portland State University. Petar Bojanic is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Ethics, Law and Applied Philosophy (CELAP) as well as the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory (Belgrade). (shrink)

The current legal and political practice of human rights invokes entitlements to freely chosen work, to decent working conditions, and to form and join labor unions. Despite the importance of these rights, they remain under-explored in the philosophical literature on human rights. This article offers a systematic and constructive discussion of them. First, it surveys the content and current relevance of the labor rights stated in the most important documents of the human rights practice. Second, it gives a moral defense (...) of these rights arguing that their support involves an appropriate response to important human interests and to the human dignity of workers. Finally, it explores central normative issues about the relation between labor rights and human dignity. It responds to some objections about the importance of work, explains why labor human rights may not exhaust the demands of dignity regarding labor and arbitrates a common tension between independence and solidarity within our practical affirmation of human dignity. (shrink)

According to David Miller, immigration is not a human right. Conversely, Kieran Oberman makes a case for immigration as a human right. We agree with the latter view, but we show that its starting point is mistaken. Indeed, both Miller and Oberman discuss the right to immigration within the liberal paradigm: it is a right or not depending on the correct balance between the interests of the citizens of a given national state and the interests of the immigrants. Instead, we (...) claim that public justification can underpin immigration as a human right. That said, the public justification of the right to immigration has several counterarguments to rebut. Before we deal with that issue, relying on Jürgen Habermas’s social theory, we examine the legal structures that could support the right to immigration in practice. To be sure, this does not provide the normative justification needed, instead it shows the framework that allows the institutional realization of this right. Then, through a combination of civic and cosmopolitan forms of solidarity, the article discusses the formation of a public sphere, which could provide the justification of the right to immigration. (shrink)

In this essay, Denike assesses the appropriation of international human rights by humanitarian law and policy of "security states." She maps representations of the perpetrators and victims of "tyranny" and "terror, " and their role in providing a "just cause" for the U.S.–led "war on terror. " By examining narratives of progress and human rights heroism Denike shows how human rights discourses, when used together with the pretense of self-defense and preemptive war, do the opposite of what they claim—entrenching the (...) sovereignty of Western imperialist states while eroding the conditions necessary for the recognition of the human rights of others. (shrink)

In this essay, Denike assesses the appropriation of international human rights by humanitarian law and policy of “security states.” She maps representations of the perpetrators and victims of “tyranny” and “terror,” and their role in providing a “just cause” for the U.S.-led “war on terror.” By examining narratives of progress and human rights heroism Denike shows how human rights discourses, when used together with the pretense of self-defense and preemptive war, do the opposite of what they claim—entrenching the sovereignty of (...) Western imperialist states while eroding the conditions necessary for the recognition of the human rights of others. (shrink)

This article discusses, principally from an English perspective, globalisation, global citizenship and two forms of education relevant to those developments (global education and citizenship education). We describe what citizenship has meant inside one nation state and ask what citizenship means, and could mean, in a globalising world. By comparing the natures of citizenship education and global education, as experienced principally in England during, approximately, the last three decades, we seek to develop a clearer understanding of what has been done and (...) what might be done in the future in order to develop education for global citizenship. We suggest that up to this point there have been significant differences between the characterisations that have been developed for global education and citizenship education. These differences are revealed through an examination of three areas: focus and origins; the attitude of the government and significant others; and the adoption of pedagogical approaches. We suggest that it would be useful to look beyond old barriers that have separated citizenship education and global education and to form a new global citizenship education. Their separation has in the past only perpetuated the old understandings of citizenship and constructed a constrained view of global education. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: This article discusses, principally from an English perspective, globalisation, global citizenship and two forms of education relevant to those developments (global education and citizenship education). We describe what citizenship has meant inside one nation state and ask what citizenship means, and could mean, in a globalising world. By comparing the natures of citizenship education and global education, as experienced principally in England during, approxim-ately, the last three decades, we seek to develop a clearer understanding of what has been done (...) and what might be done in the future in order to develop education for global citizenship. We suggest that up to this point there have been significant differences between the characterisations that have been developed for global education and citizenship education. These differences are revealed through an examination of three areas: focus and origins; the attitude of the government and significant others; and the adoption of pedagogical approaches. We suggest that it would be useful to look beyond old barriers that have separated citizenship education and global education and to form a new global citizenship education. Their separation has in the past only perpetuated the old understandings of citizenship and constructed a constrained view of global education. (shrink)

The principle of the child's right to an open future was first proposed by the legal philosopher Joel Feinberg and developed further by bioethicist Dena Davis. The principle holds that children possess a unique class of rights called rights in trust—rights that they cannot yet exercise, but which they will be able to exercise when they reach maturity. Parents should not, therefore, take actions that permanently foreclose on or pre-empt the future options of their children, but leave them the greatest (...) possible scope for exercising personal life choices in adulthood. Davis particularly applies the principle to genetic counselling, arguing that parents should not take deliberate steps to create physically abnormal children, and to religion, arguing that while parents are entitled to bring their children up in accordance with their own values, they are not entitled to inflict physical or mental harm, neither by omission nor commission. In this paper, I aim to elucidate the open future principle, and consider whether it is applicable to non-therapeutic circumcision of boys, whether performed for cultural/religious or for prophylactic/health reasons. I argue that the principle is highly applicable to non-therapeutic circumcision, and conclude that non-therapeutic circumcision would be a violation of the child's right to an open future, and thus objectionable from both an ethical and a human rights perspective. (shrink)

In recent years, dozens of human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) across the globe have begun to advocate for economic and social rights, which represents a significant expansion of the human rights movement. This article investigates a central strategy that NGOs have pursued to realize these rights: legalization. Legalization involves specifying rights as valid legal rules and enforcing them through judicial or quasi-judicial processes. After documenting some of the progress made toward legalization, the article analyzes five unique challenges involved in legalizing (...) economic and social rights. It is important to identify these challenges because they must be overcome if the human rights movement wishes to refute the notion that economic and social rights are inherently non-justiciable (and therefore, to some, invalid as rights). These challenges also point to the possibility that legalization is not the only, or even the best, strategic pathway to realize economic and social rights effectively. (shrink)

One hundred years ago, most wars occurred between nations; today, large-scale violent conflict consists almost exclusively of civil wars in which civilians constitute 30 percent of casualties.’ According to a recent World Bank study of conflict, the poorest one-sixth of the worlds population suffers four-fifths of the consequences of civil wars. While poverty is the greatest risk factor determining a nation’s likelihood of entering into conflict, it is also one of instability’s most predictable consequencet—thus, war is a vicious cycle, and (...) poor nations may remain at risk for intense violence for years or even decades. (shrink)

A conception of global citizenship should not be viewed as separate from, or synonymous with, the cosmopolitan moral orientation, but as a primary component of it. Global citizenship is fundamentally concerned with individual moral requirements in the global frame. Such requirements, framed here as belonging to the category of individual cosmopolitanism, offer guidelines on right action in the context of global human community. They are complementary to the principles of moral cosmopolitanism — those to be used in assessing the justice (...) of global institutions and practices — that have been emphasised by cosmopolitan political theorists. Considering principles of individual and moral cosmopolitanism together can help to provide greater clarity concerning individual duties in the absence of fully global institutions, as well as clarity on individual obligations of justice in relation to emerging and still-developing trans-state institutions. (shrink)

Viewed in its entirety, moral philosophizing, and the moral behavior of people throughout history, presents a curious puzzle. On the one hand, interpersonal duties display a remarkably stable core content: morality the world over enjoins people to keep their word; refrain from violence, theft and cheating; and help those in need. On the other hand, the asserted motives that drive people’s moral actions evince a dazzling diversity: from empathy or sympathy, to practical or prudential reason, to custom and honor, cultural (...) identity, excellence and independence, faith and spirituality, narrative and beauty, and more besides. I term this twin phenomenon—a core of fixed moral duties driven by diverse motives—“moral motive pluralism.” In this article, I marshal evidence to show the prevalence of the phenomenon. Contrary to widespread assumptions, across generations and cultures, diverse motives drive different people to perform their moral duties. But despite this diversity, each different motive impels conscientious compliance with the same core moral duties. I argue this phenomenon undermines key types of evidence commonly employed to justify popular moral philosophies, and provides us with reason to seriously consider certain sorts of ethical theories—especially “functionalist” accounts of morality. (shrink)