Juridical Empowerment: Empowering the Impoverished as Rights-Asserters

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 26 (2):237-254 (2022)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

The idea of empowerment has gained a significant role in the discourse of poverty. I outline a restricted conception of empowerment inspired by Kant’s idea of rightful honour. According to this conception, empowerment consists in enabling individuals to assert their own human rights (juridical empowerment). I apply this conception to impoverished persons and argue that it is crucial to their self-respect, their so-called ‘power-[from-]within,’ and their political agency, and has a teleological primacy regarding our efforts to reduce poverty. I also defend the idea that there is a moral right to this form of empowerment and a corresponding duty to empower the impoverished as rights-asserters. Juridical empowerment will be compatible with a pluralism of substantive accounts of the moral wrongs of poverty and with broader conceptions of empowerment.

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

Unraveling and discovering: the conceptual relations between the concept of power and the concept of empowerment.Brian Thomas - 2011 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 14 (4):443-463.
From agency/empowerment to embodied empowerment.Mary Sue Richardson - 1994 - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 14 (1):79-82.
Passive Empowerment.Serene Khader - 2018 - Philosophical Topics 46 (2):141-163.
Durable empowerment.Jay Drydyk - 2008 - Journal of Global Ethics 4 (3):231 – 245.
Ethics and Empowerment.John J. Quinn & Peter W. F. Davies - 1999 - Purdue University Press.
The ethics of empowerment.Jeffrey Gandz & Frederick G. Bird - 1996 - Journal of Business Ethics 15 (4):383 - 392.
Habermas on reason and revolution.Deborah Cook - 2001 - Continental Philosophy Review 34 (3):321-338.
Women's empowerment: the insights of Wangari Maathai.Gail M. Presbey - 2013 - Journal of Global Ethics 9 (3):277-292.

Analytics

Added to PP
2022-06-06

Downloads
123 (#136,150)

6 months
44 (#80,001)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Reza Mosayebi
Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Force and freedom: Kant's legal and political philosophy.Arthur Ripstein - 2009 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Responsibility for Justice.Iris Marion Young - 2011 - , US: Oxford University Press USA.
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.Immanuel Kant - 1785/2002 - In Practical Philosophy. Cambridge University Press. pp. 37-108.
Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform.Tommie Shelby - 2016 - Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

View all 29 references / Add more references