The work of Henri Bergson, the foremost French philosopher of the early twentieth century, is not usually explored for its political dimensions. Indeed, Bergson is best known for his writings on time, evolution, and creativity. This book concentrates instead on his political philosophy—and especially on his late masterpiece, _The Two Sources of Morality and Religion_—from which Alexandre Lefebvre develops an original approach to human rights. We tend to think of human rights as the urgent international (...) project of protecting all people everywhere from harm. Bergson shows us that human rights can also serve as a medium of personal transformation and self-care. For Bergson, the main purpose of human rights is to initiate all human beings into love. Forging connections between human rights scholarship and philosophy as self-care, Lefebvre uses human rights to channel the whole of Bergson's philosophy. (shrink)

This note on human rights practice observes that some pedagogical methods in human rights education can have the effect of making human rights violations both seem to be performed by abnormal, bad actors and seem to occur in places far away from US classrooms. This effect is not intended by instructors; a methodological corrective would be helpful to human rights education. This note provides a corrective by suggesting two practices: (1) a pedagogical (...) emphasis on what the Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant calls ‘entanglements’, or the way in which normal, local actions are tied to global consequences in our contemporary world; and (2) a pedagogical exercise of performing a phenomenology of, or first-person reflection on, daily life as it relates to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The emphasis and exercise work together to implicate the actor in larger patterns of human rights violations and protections. Overall, the emphasis and exercise prevent an insidious insinuation of some human rights education: that human rights violations are to be theorized in the global North but suffered in the global South. (shrink)

Human rights, as traditionally understood in the West, are grounded in an anthropocentric theory of personhood. However, as this chapter argues, such a stance is certainly not culturally universal; historically, it is derivable from a cultural orientation that is Greek in origin. Such an orientation conflates thought with language (logos), and identifies humans as uniquely deserving of moral consideration or standing to the exclusion of non-human knowers. The linguistic theory of thought impedes insight and understanding of both (...) Indian and Western contributions to political and moral thought. It is argued that the idea that we have rights by virtue of being human is problematic. In contrast, the chapter argues for an account of personal rights derivable from Patañjali’s philosophy. On a Patañjalian account, the rights necessary for the good of persons transcend species, sex, caste, race, class, age, ability, and sexual orientation. (shrink)

Modern societies often claim to be democracies in order to enjoy greater legitimacy. Still, to understand the concept of democracy and how to justify it, the definition of it as self-determined is not sufficient. A complex understanding has to take into account ideas of rule of law as well as human rights. Sometimes these three concepts compete with each other - particularly in societies with a pluralistic approach to what "the good life" should be, such as societies which (...) are made up of distinct cultural backgrounds. This book presents a concept of democracy that encompasses at the same time the ideas of rule of law, human rights and self-determination. It contains the main lectures of the XXVI World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, hosted by the Internationale Vereinigung fur Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Brazil) in July 2013. (shrink)

He argues that an adequate idea of human rights must take such a diversity seriously, and unlike the UN Declaration, it must not presuppose Western institutions and values.

During the last 20 years, philosophers from different quarters and with very different approaches have begun to theorize human rights in an outpouring of authored and edited books and journal articles. In addition, among policy makers and in the legal arena—the so called workings fields of human rights—there have been noteworthy investigations of human rights that tackle philosophical issues. In this book, Anat Biletzki brings a systematic approach to the multitudinous philosophical analyses of (...) class='Hi'>human rights, offering a cohesive overview and analysis of this diverse but now very active field. She explores both the conceptual and historical treatments of human rights and the roots of its practice and examines its derivation from classical theories of rights all the way to existing uses. The book is "contemporary" in two senses: it investigates the most current human rights issues and it addresses emerging criticism of human rights, now arising in various sectors. A long introduction provides background information on the history of human rights, a synopsis of modern-day documents, and an articulation of basic questions. This is followed by a section on the philosophical groundings of human rights, proceeding from a philosophy of rights, to specific theories of human rights, to the questions of universalism vs. relativism. The third sections focuses on specific philosophical issues in human rights, including cultural relativity, economic rights, women’s rights, group, indigenous, and minority rights, security, and sovereignty and humanitarian intervention. And a final section on critiques of human rights has separate chapters on postmodernism, anti-foundationalism, and human rights discourse and practice. (shrink)

Erudite and timely, this book is a key contribution to the renewal of radical theory and politics.

This article examines the following questions: Is there a human right to food and water in the international sphere? Is it possible to derive such human rights as “general principles of law” within the meaning of public international law, which are independent from contractual agreement or recognition by States? What exactly would such a right to food and water comprise? Is there a constitutional rank relationship evolving between human rights and public international law which might (...) affect the interpretation of, e. g., WTO law? How can conflicting considerations be balanced? (shrink)

It is our job now - the job of this book - to influence and develop the unsettled discourse of human rights so as to complete the incomplete idea.

Cosmopolitans argue that the account of human rights and distributive justice in John Rawls's The Law of Peoples is incompatible with his argument for liberal justice. Rawls should extend his account of liberal basic liberties and the guarantees of distributive justice to apply to the world at large. This essay defends Rawls's grounding of political justice in social cooperation. The Law of Peoples is drawn up to provide principles of foreign policy for liberal peoples. Human rights (...) are among the necessary conditions for social cooperation, and so long as a decent people respect human rights, a common good, and the Law of Peoples, it is not the role of liberal peoples to impose upon well-ordered decent peoples liberal liberties they cannot endorse. Moreover, the difference principle is not an allocative or alleviatory principle, but applies to design property and other basic social institutions necessary to economic production, exchange and consumption. It presupposes political cooperation—a legislative body to actively apply it, and a legal system to apply it to. There is no feasible global state or global legal system that could serve these roles. Finally, the difference principle embodies a conception of democratic reciprocity that is only appropriate to cooperation among free and equal citizens who are socially productive and politically autonomous. a Footnotesa I am grateful to K. C. Tan for many helpful discussions and criticisms of this essay. I am also grateful to the other contributors to this volume for their comments, and to Ellen Paul for her many helpful suggestions in preparing the final version of this essay. (shrink)

Is it defensible to use the concept of a right? Can we justify this concept's central place in modern moral and legal thinking, or does it unjustifiably side-line those who do not qualify as right-holders? Rowan Cruft brings together a new account of the concept of a right. Moving beyond the traditional 'interest theory' and 'will theory', he defends a distinctive role for the concept: it is appropriate to our thinking about fundamental moral duties springing from the good of the (...) right-holder. This has important implications for the idea of 'natural' moral rights-that is, rights that exist independently of anyone's recognising that they do. Cruft argues that only rights that exist primarily for the sake of the right-holder can qualify as natural in this sense.In its relation to property, however, matters are far more complicated because much property is groundable only by common or collective goods beyond the right-holder's own good. For such property, Cruft argues that a non-rights property system-that resembles modern markets but is not conceived in terms of rights-would be preferable. The result of this study is a partial vindication of the rights concept that is more supportive of human rights than many of their critics might expect, and is surprisingly doubtful about property as an individual right. (shrink)

The consequentialist project for human rights -- Exceptions to libertarian natural rights -- The main principle -- What is well-being? What is equity? -- The two deepest mysteries in moral philosophy -- Security rights -- Epistemological foundations for the priority of autonomy rights -- The millian epistemological argument for autonomy rights -- Property rights, contract rights, and other economic rights -- Democratic rights -- Equity rights -- The most (...) reliable judgment standard for weak paternalism -- Liberty rights and privacy rights -- Clarifications and responses to objections -- Conclusion. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Human Rights brings together an extensive collection of classical and contemporary writings on the topic of human rights, including genocide, ethnic cleansing, minority cultures, gay and lesbian rights, and the environment, providing an exceptionally comprehensive introduction. Sources include authors such as Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, Confucius, Hobbes, Locke, rant. Marx, Gandhi. Hart, Feinberg, Nussbaum, the Dalai Lama, Derrida, Lyocard and Rorty. Ideal for courses in human rights, social theory, ethical (...) theory, and political science, each reading; begins with a brief introduction, and is followed with study questions and suggested further readings. (shrink)

"We hold these truths to be self-evident..." So begins the U.S. Declaration of Independence. What follows those words is a ringing endorsement of universal rights, but it is far from self-evident. Why did the authors claim that it was? William Talbott suggests that they were trapped by a presupposition of Enlightenment philosophy: That there was only one way to rationally justify universal truths, by proving them from self-evident premises. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the (...) authors of the U.S. Declaration had no infallible source of moral truth. For example, many of the authors of the Declaration of Independence endorsed slavery. The wrongness of slavery was not self-evident; it was a moral discovery. In this book, William Talbott builds on the work of John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, J.S. Mill, Amartya Sen, and Henry Shue to explain how, over the course of history, human beings have learned how to adopt a distinctively moral point of view from which it is possible to make universal, though not infallible, judgments of right and wrong. He explains how this distinctively moral point of view has led to the discovery of the moral importance of nine basic rights. Undoubtedly, the most controversial issue raised by the claim of universal rights is the issue of moral relativism. How can the advocate of universal rights avoid being a moral imperialist? In this book, Talbott shows how to defend basic individual rights from a universal moral point of view that is neither imperialistic nor relativistic. Talbott avoids moral imperialism by insisting that all of us, himself included, have moral blindspots and that we usually depend on others to help us to identify those blindspots. Talbott's book speaks to not only debates on human rights but to broader issues of moral and cultural relativism, and will interest a broad range of readers. (shrink)

Joyful Human Rights espouses a joy-centered approach that provides new insights into foundational human rights issues. William Paul Simmons offers a framework -- surveying a more comprehensive understanding of human experiences -- for theorizing and practicing a more affirmative and robust notion of human rights.

The notion of “human rights” is widely used in political and moral discussions. The core idea, that all human beings have some inalienable basic rights, is appealing and has an eminently practical function: It allows moral criticism of various wrongs and calls for action in order to prevent them. On the other hand it is unclear what exactly a human right is. Human rights lack a convincing conceptual foundation that would be able to (...) compel the wrong-doer to accept human rights claims as well-founded. Hence the practical function faces theoretical doubts. The present collection takes up the tension between the wide political use of human rights claims and the intellectual skepticism about them. In particular two major issues are identified that call for conceptual clarification in order to better understand human rights claims both in theory and in practice: the question of how to justify human rights and the tension between universal normative claims and particular moralities. (shrink)

This contradiction ”1. The universal right to free speech did not exist before the European Enlightenment, at which time it came into existence. 2. The universal right to free speech has always existed, but this right was recognized only at the time of the European Enlightenment.” draws on two common and conflicting intuitions: The human right to free speech exists because institutions, or the law, says so. In contrast, the human right to free speech can exist independently of (...) institutions—these institutions simply recognize a right we already have. John Searle argues that his status function account of human rights can preserve both intuitions by showing that the inconsistency between and is merely apparent. I argue that this solution works for tokens of human rights but not for types, while the contradiction concerns types. Hence, the status function account of human rights fails to preserve both intuitions. (shrink)

Rather than treating them as discrete and incommensurable ideas, we sketch some connections between human flourishing and human dignity, and link them to human rights. We contend that the metaphor of flourishing provides an illuminating aspirational framework for thinking about human development and obligations, and that the idea of human dignity is a critical element within that discussion. We conclude with some suggestions as to how these conceptions of human dignity and human (...) flourishing might underpin and inform appeals to human rights. (shrink)

This timely book by internationally regarded scholar of ethics and social/political philosophy, Michael Boylan, focuses on the history, application and significance of human rights in the West and China. Boylan engages the key current philosophical debates prevalent in human rights discourse today and draws them together to argue for the existence of natural, universal human rights. Arguing against the grain of mainstream philosophical beliefs, Boylan asserts that there is continuity between human (...) class='Hi'>rights and natural law and that human beings require basic, essential goods for minimum action. These include food, clean water and sanitation, clothing, shelter and protection from bodily harm, including basic healthcare. The achievement of this goal, Boylan demonstrates, will require significant resource allocation and creative methods of implementation involving public and private institutions. Combining technical argument with four fictional narratives about human rights, the book invites readers to engage with the most important aspects of the discipline. (shrink)

This article counters the popular misunderstanding that China lacks a conception of human rights in its philosophical heritage. The authors demonstrate that even divergent traditions such as Classical Confucianism and Mohism provide strong and pervasive antecedents for human rights ideology, and both have much to contribute to the contemporary Chinese articulation of human rights theory and practice. The first part of the article shows that traditional Confucian values have the capacity to produce a social (...) environment in which rights outcomes are realized, yet without recourse to the full legal mechanisms of Western claim-rights. The second part of the article reveals that Mohism offers several insights and motivations for contemporary human rights ideology. Thus, the authors substantiate that historic Chinese philosophy supports a meaningful framework for human rights, refuting the claim that human rights is alien to the Chinese way. (shrink)

In "Rights and Reason", Jonathan Gorman sets discussion of the 'rights debate' within a wide-ranging philosophical and historical framework. Drawing on positions in epistemology, metaphysics and the theory of human nature as well as on the ideas of canonical thinkers, Gorman provides an introduction to the philosophy of rights that is firmly grounded in the history of philosophy as well as the concerns of contemporary political and legal philosophy. The book gives readers a (...) clear sense that, just as there are arguments about the content of rights, and just as there are myriad claims to rights, so there are pluralities of theories of rights that offer some understanding of the moral and legal realm and of the place rights may hold within it. Gorman argues that in a pluralist context of inconsistent rights we require pragmatic procedures rather than universal principles of justice to resolve conflicting claims. (shrink)

Fragmented social relations, the twin demise of authority and tradition, the breakdown of behavioural norms and constraints: all these are the outcome, according to their critics, of the uses and abuses of human rights in contemporary democratic societies. We are, they say, seeing the perverse effects of a 'religion of human rights' to which Europe has rashly devoted its heart and mind; and the supposed burgeoning of rights, which goes hand in hand with an unchecked (...) rise of expectations, is catapulting Western democracies into an age of never-ending demands. This emerged clearly in France in Spring 2013 during the demonstrations against equal marriage ('mariage pour tous') whose opponents deplored the excesses of a movement-driven left striving for an unbounded extension of rights - from the right to same-sex marriage to the enfranchisement of non-nationals or the right of same-sex couples to adopt. (shrink)

Kristen Hessler argues that philosophy can best contribute to understanding human rights by exploring the full range of their use in practice. Her approach emphasizes how human rights activism and adjudication can both reveal and dismantle unjust social hierarchies. The result is an innovative vision of interdisciplinary human rights scholarship.

Global processes and changes on a scale previously unknown, the strengthening of the power of world socialism, the class struggle and that for national liberation, the many phenomena, diverse in nature and consequences, of the revolution in science and technology in different socio-economic systems and their impact on the individual, the danger threatening civilization because of the arms race, the growth of means of extermination of human beings and the material conditions for their existence - all of these make (...) the rights of the individual a priority problem in the political and ideological life of our day. (shrink)

Given the fact that the prevalent political debates about the status and significance of liberty and welfare are almost polarised, this book defends both of them as essential to human dignity and well being. Amartya Sen's capability approach is the result of his constructive criticism of John Rawls' political liberalism. Though Jacques Maritain is often regarded as the forerunner of Rawls, he has not yet been discussed in relation to Sen's capability approach. Despite Maritain's pioneering contributions to human (...) rights discourse in the twentieth century, his personalism only insufficiently reflects and explains the demands of welfare rights. In view of this shared deficit in liberal traditions, this book argues that Sen's human rights discourse, with its 'goal rights system,' persuasively integrates both liberty and welfare rights. In addition, it merges both human rights and human development discourses, consequently laying a solid foundation for a rights based approach to development"--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Bernard Bosanquet has not had a good twentieth century. Though he wrote on virtually the full range of philosophical subjects from logic, epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, through political theory and ethics, to aesthetics and the philosophy of religion, attention to his work remains subdued. He has certainly not benefited to anything like the extent of F.H. Bradley, T.H. Green, and R.G. Collingwood from the recent modest revival of interest in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British Idealism.

The problem that underlies Rawls' The Law of Peoples is the problem of how something particular—western— may become universal and human. Rawls claims that he solves this problem by means of extending particular western rights to other non western peoples. The extension of western liberal rights is done by a second original position similar to the first one in A Theory of Justice. The paper tries to prove that the second original position, in its second step, is (...) not similar to the first one and the parties taking part in this second original position are not symmetrically situated. Rawls' proposal falls into ethnocentrism and eurocentrism. The only way to transform particular rights into universal rights is by means of a universal multicultural dialogue where all peoples can make proposals and listen to other peoples' proposals. (shrink)

We live in a human-rights world. The language of human-rights claims and numerous human-rights institutions shape almost all aspects of our political lives, yet we struggle to know how to judge this development. Scholars give us good reason to be both supportive and sceptical of the universal claims that human rights enable, alternatively suggesting that they are pillars of cross-cultural understanding of justice or the ideological justification of a violent and exclusionary global (...) order. All too often, however, our evaluations of our human-rights world are not based on sustained consideration of their complex, ambiguous and often contradictory consequences. Reconstructing Human Rights argues that human rights are only as good as the ends they help us realise. We must attend to what ethical principles actually do in the world to know their value. So, for human rights we need to consider how the identity of humanity and the concept of rights shape our thinking, structure our political activity and contribute to social change. Reconstructing Human Rights defends human rights as a tool that should enable us to challenge political authority and established constellations of political membership by making new claims possible. Human rights mobilise the identity of humanity to make demands upon the terms of legitimate authority and challenges established political memberships. In this work, it is argued that this tool should be guided by a democratising ethos in pursuit of that enables claims for more democratic forms of politics and more inclusive political communities. While this work directly engages with debates about human rights in philosophy and political theory, in connecting our evaluations of the value of human rights to their worldly consequences, it will also be of interest to scholars considering human rights across disciplines, including Law, Sociology, and Anthropology. (shrink)

Human rights have a rich life in the world around us. Political rhetoric pays tribute to them, or scorns them. Citizens and activists strive for them. The law enshrines them. And they live inside us too. For many of us, human rights form part of how we understand the world and what must (or must not) be done within it. -/- The ubiquity of human rights raises questions for the philosopher. If we want to (...) understand these rights, where do we look? As a set of moral norms, it is tempting to think they can be grasped strictly from the armchair, say, by appeal to moral intuition. But what, if anything, can that kind of inquiry tell us about the human rights of contemporary politics, law, and civil society — that is, human rights as we ordinarily know them? -/- This volume brings together a distinguished, interdisciplinary group of scholars to address philosophical questions raised by the many facets of human rights: moral, legal, political, and historical. Its original chapters, each accompanied by a critical commentary, explore topics including: the purpose and methods of a philosophical theory of human rights; the "Orthodox-Political" debate; the relevance of history to philosophy; the relationship between human rights morality and law; and the value of political critiques of human rights. (shrink)

It is common knowledge that modern political societies, and to even greater extent contemporary ones, are characterized by pluralism. The term is used to describe situations which contain within the same society individuals and groups associated by various religions, various cultures, and various ethical systems. This is the consequence of several historical phenomena of widespread influence, which began in modern epoch and has intensified in the contemporary era, such as secularization, emigration, the establishment of democratic regimes in an even-larger number (...) of states. The thesis defended here is that the function of what Aristotle called the endoxa today can be performed by human rights, that is by the statements contained in the great declarations of rights found in national constitutional documents and in charters of the great international organizations, such as the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the Organization of African Unity, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, etc. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Rights, China, and Cross-Cultural Inquiry:Philosophy, History, and Power PoliticsRandall PeerenboomStephen Angle's Human Rights and Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) is a wonderful book that combines philosophically sophisticated discussions of controversial human-rights issues with a detailed intellectual history of the evolution of human-rights discourse in China over the last several hundred years. I will use (...) Angle's book as a platform for consideration of a number of issues regarding the role of philosophy, history, and power politics in relation to human rights in China and elsewhere.Angle focuses his discussion on two claims: first, that countries have different concepts of human rights, and second, that we ought not demand that countries comply with human-rights concepts different from their own.1 These two claims (or something similar) are central to China's official position on rights and to humanrights debates more generally, including the debate about values in Asia.2Angle's response, in short, is that there are distinctive concepts of human rights in China, and that "there have been both continuities and changes in the ways that rights have been conceptualized over the course of China's rich and distinctive rights discourse" (p. 250). However, the only way a community can unilaterally declare its values and practices immune from the scrutiny of others is through "parochialism," which, according to Angle, cuts off that community from making legitimate demands on others. Rather, he suggests, we "should seek an accommodation of differences with one another in the spirit of toleration, and on that basis engage one another on as many levels as possible" (pp. 250-251).One of the many great strengths of this book is that Angle grounds his responses in an interesting and insightful discussion of contemporary philosophers, assessing along the way the contributions and limits of MacIntrye, Rawls, Dworkin, Raz, Walzer, and especially Brandom, among others, to this cross-cultural inquiry of human rights. It might seem, given this list of luminaries, Angle's own training in Western analytic philosophy, and his position in the philosophy department of an American university, that Western philosophy is driving the debate and dictating the fundamental terms and parameters of the inquiry.3 This, of course, is precisely one of the complaints of non-Westerners such as Liu Huaqiu, who argue that they are being measured by Western standards, that rights are concepts grounded in historically contingent modern Western philosophical traditions, and that the rights movement is biased in favor of secular liberalism, which is at odds with and may preclude states based on religious worldviews and communitarian or collectivist [End Page 283] points of view that do not privilege autonomy, choice, and individual interests to the extent that liberals do.Angle's response is twofold. First, he argues, sensibly enough, that we cannot and need not set aside or escape our traditions and value systems. Cross-cultural inquiry must begin from somewhere. But we must remain open-minded and willing to continue the conversation, at least for a considerable while and in most cases indefinitely, even if in some cases we simultaneously must rely on coercion and repression.4 As discussed below, Angle endorses a limited moral pluralism that tolerates some differences while not providing an excuse for appeasing dictators or turning a blind eye to genocide and other atrocities.Second, Angle is not out simply to measure China by the standards of contemporary Western philosophers. Rather, he wants to show that China has its own distinctive discourse on rights, and that this discourse is multifaceted and constantly evolving. According to Angle, "Chinese rights discourse should be seen as an ongoing creative achievement, rather than a reaction to or misunderstanding of Western ideas and institutions" (p. 2).5 He shows this by providing a detailed intellectual history of Chinese rights discourse, another great strength of the book. His primary focus is on several prominent Neo-Confucians and pre-1949 debates, although he also considers some contemporary debates.6 Angle is clearly successful at demonstrating that Chinese thinkers have advanced a number of different views and that rights discourse over the last century and a half has been... (shrink)

Most of the theories of rights propounded by philosophers, right from the beginning till the twentieth century, conceive rights either as a claim against the state or an obligation upon the state. Certainly such a conception has had something to do with the prevailing social, political and economic systems of the time concerned. Social, political and economic systems also had a particular relationship amongst them. Change in individual and social perspectives, values, priorities and beliefs has affected the (...) class='Hi'>philosophy of right. From the ages of Locke and Hobbes when natural right was taken in obvious terms to the times of communitarians like Michael Sandel and thinkers like Ronald Dworkin the term “Right” has earned many dimensions. Progress and changing arrangements of systems complicates the status of a philosophical theory of rights propounded at a particular time, in the sense that its losses its teeth in any new found milieu. This paper evaluates the notion of abstract universalism of individual rights in the light of Gandhian notion of duty. (shrink)

A symposium on the subject "The Crisis of Bourgeois Democracy and Violation of Human Rights in the Capitalist World" took place in Moscow in December 1976. The symposium was conducted by the Institute of State and Law and the Learned Council of the USSR Academy of Sciences on Problems of Ideological Currents Abroad.