Human Rights: Sometimes One Thought Too Many?

Jurisprudence 7 (1):111-126 (2016)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

It is commonly claimed, in the global justice literature, that global injustices are best characterised in terms of the violation or unfulfilment of human rights. I suggest that global justice theorists are overconfident on this point. For decolonising peoples, contemporary global injustice is likely to be characterised in terms drawn from local histories of injustice and the constellations of thick ethical concepts they contain. To make the point I describe how the Māori of New Zealand, who do not reject human rights, typically make no reference to human rights in political argument. I argue that the Māori are reasonable to consider human rights talk to be ‘one thought too many’, and the considerations that make this so typically apply in other postcolonial contexts of political activity.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Towards a politics for human rights: Ambiguous humanity and democratizing rights.Joe Hoover - 2013 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 39 (9):0191453713498390.
The Sovereignty of Human Rights.Patrick Macklem - 2015 - Oxford University Press USA.
Human Rights: The Hard Questions.Cindy Holder & David Reidy (eds.) - 2013 - Cambridge University Press.
Global ethics and human rights: A reflection.Sumner B. Twiss - 2011 - Journal of Religious Ethics 39 (2):204-222.
The Global Reach of Human Rights.Amartya Sen - 2012 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 29 (2):91-100.
On global justice.Mathias Risse - 2012 - Princeton: Princeton University Press.
The Proliferation of Human Rights in Global Health Governance.Lance Gable - 2007 - Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 35 (4):534-544.
Global justice and the limits of human rights.Dale Dorsey - 2005 - Philosophical Quarterly 55 (221):562–581.
Empowering the Invisible: Women, Local Culture and Global Human Rights Protection.Sirkku K. Hellsten - 2010 - Thought and Practice: A Journal of the Philosophical Association of Kenya 2 (1):37-57.

Analytics

Added to PP
2016-04-05

Downloads
34 (#407,456)

6 months
2 (#670,035)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Simon Hope
University of Stirling

References found in this work

Justice and the priority of politics to morality.Andrea Sangiovanni - 2007 - Journal of Political Philosophy 16 (2):137–164.
Cosmopolitanism: a critique.David Miller - 2002 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 5 (3):80-85.
Responses to the critics.Thomas Pogge - 2010 - In Alison M. Jaggar (ed.), Thomas Pogge and His Critics. Polity.
.Martha C. Nussbaum & Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (eds.) - 1992 - Clarendon Press.

View all 8 references / Add more references