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)

The division of political scientists into philosophers and sociologists is an important factor behind their inability to understand politics. Sociologists are incapable of grasping the whole, philosophers are bad at understanding particularities. The aim of the paper is to show the inadequacy of both of these forms of knowledge. Immanuel Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgement allows us to gain a better understanding of politics. Hannah Arendt attempted to explain Kant’s Critique of Judgment as an important treatise for political philosophy. The (...) power of judgement opens up a broad horizon for our imagination. Ideas can be associated with various different appearances and this is why reliable theoretical definition of politics is impossible. It is impossible to ascribe an adequate object of experience to the idea of politics and for this very reason various substitutes are used. The formation of these substitutes corresponds to the requirements of the power of judgement that connects universality to particularity. The analysis of the aesthetic judgement reveals why attempts to define politics face unsolvable difficulties. Philosophers and sociologists attempt to gain a theoretical understanding of an object which belongs to the realm of aesthetic judgement. The article does not provide an answer to the problem of definition of politics, it shows why such a definition is impossible. (shrink)

This paper examines Hannah Arendt’s account of the relationship between politics and morality. Many critics have argued that Arendt’s conception of political action lacks any moral foundations, while others have tried to focus on her understanding of thinking as a normative source of her ethics. In contrast to these views, I present an alternative explanation and argue that the sources of Arendt’s political ethics are located neither in the faculty of thinking nor in extrapolitical moral norms or rules, but in (...) the ontological conditions of action, specifically worldliness, natality and plurality. This interpretation allows us to make sense of Arendt’s fragmented, unsystematic accounts of the various virtues and moral dispositions required for authentic politics: courage, responsibility, care, respect, moderation, solidarity and gratitude. In particular, an inquiry into the ontological sources of political ethics provides a solid normative grounding for the two moral dispositions—promise and forgiveness—that form an explicit “moral code” of political action for Arendt. (shrink)

In this study I primarily deal with the problem of historical understanding in the work of Hannah Arendt. In doing so, I try to show that Arendt’s ideas concerning the problem of understanding history may be compared to the works of Heidegger and Gadamer and further developed using some hermeneutical insights as found in their works. I also try to address the topic of judgment; I attempt to show that for Arendt, judgment is an integral, indispensable part of the process (...) of understanding. (shrink)