Human Rights, Legitimacy, Political Judgement

Moral and Political Conceptions of Human Rights

Oxford University Press, 2018

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. --- A rich collection of focussed dialogues ― a provocative gift for teaching ― in which the lively ferment over human rights in recent years is deepened, often by becoming refreshingly interdisciplinary, and exciting new formulations are proposed by a diverse range of leading scholars. (Henry Shue, author of Basic Rights (1996)) The Universal Declaration of Human Rights may be the single most influential document of the twentieth century, but is also one of the most controversial. In Human Rights: Moral or Political? Adam Etinson has brought together more than 30 leading legal, political, historical and philosophical commentators on human rights to discuss one anothers claims. The authors range from those who see human rights as successors to natural rights, so as providing universal moral standards, to those who see human rights as positive legal and political instruments that are changing the international order... this collection is seriously and usefully critical not only on these fundamental issues, but also on knotty questions about specific rights, about principles of legal interpretation and about the limits of juridification. (Onora O'Neill, author of Justice Across Boundaries: Whose Obligations? (2016) and winner of the 2017 Berggruen Prize) This is an impressive collection of essays by outstanding human rights scholars from a variety of disciplines. It is certain to make a lasting impact on contemporary thinking about human rights. Taking off from the current debate on the proper status of human rights as "orthodox" or "political," the essays in this volume not only move this important debate forward but also enable a genuine dialogue across disciplines on fundamental philosophical, political and legal questions surrounding human rights and human rights practice. The collection thus excellently represents the depth and scope of engagement across disciplinary boundaries that understanding human rights in all their complexity requires. It will be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the past, present and future of human rights. (Cristina Lafont, author of Global Governance and Human Rights (2012)) Those of us whose work is focused on 'applied' human rights in law, politics, or ethics may nevertheless experience a need for fundamental reflection on the 'big' philosophical questions regarding human rights. Such craving can now be satisfied with a single book. With no less than 30 chapters and an unseen concentration of stars of the philosophical and other firmaments, it can also be read as a sample book, introducing readers to different ways of philosophical rights reasoning. The majority of the chapters engage in discussions at a very abstract or general level. While this may be off-putting to the practical-minded, it also guarantees relevance across the entire field of human rights scholarship, regardless of disciplines, jurisdictions and thematic specialisations. (Eva Brems, Professor of Human Rights Law, University of Gent)

2012

Human rights have become a wider and more visible feature of our political discourse, yet many have also noted the great discrepancy between the human rights invoked in this discourse and traditional philosophical accounts that conceive of human rights as natural rights. This article explores an alternative approach in which human rights are conceived primarily as international norms aimed at securing the basic conditions of membership or inclusion in a political society. Central to this 'political conception' of human rights is the idea of human rights as special (in contrast to general) rights that individuals possess in virtue of specific associative relations they stand in to one another. This view is explored and defended through a critical review of four recent political conceptions -Michael Ignatieff, John Rawls, Thomas Pogge and Joshua Cohen.

The International Journal of Human Rights, 2016

In one important strand of the philosophical debate, human rights are seen as a practical benchmark to evaluate and orient matters of national politics, international relations and global governance. The article investigates the possible benefits and problems of this approach. Problematising the well-established distinction between moral and political human rights in philosophical human rights debate, the author follows Paolo Gilabert's attempt to alternatively discuss human rights under the perspective of rights having both an abstract and a specific dimension. Discussing the (self-) understanding of the contemporary human being as representing the subject of human rights, Axel Honneth's recognition theory is applied to concretise Gilabert's humanist claim to do justice to the 'essentially social' nature of the human being. While holding on to the traditional idea that human rights are in first instance to be understood as individual rights human beings have in virtue of being human, the important international political function of human rights is accounted for by introducing the term cosmopolitan rights.

Current Legal Problems, 2012

Two important trends are discernible in the contemporary philosophy of human rights. According to foundationalism, human rights have importantly distinctive normative grounds as compared with other moral norms. An extreme version of foundationalism claims that human interests do not figure among the grounds of human rights; a more moderate version restricts the human interests that can ground human rights to a subset of that general class, eg basic needs or our interest in freedom. According to functionalism, it belongs to the essence of human rights that they play a certain political role or combination of such roles, eg operating as benchmarks for the legitimacy of states or triggers for intervention against states that violate them. This article presents a view of human rights that opposes both the foundationalist and the functionalist trends. Against foundationalism, it is argued that a plurality of normative values ground human rights; these values include not only the equal moral status of all human beings but also potentially all universal human interests. Against functionalism, it is argued that human rights are moral standards-moral rights possessed by all human beings simply in virtue of their humanity-that may perform a plurality of political functions, but that none of these functions is definitive of their nature as human rights. The ensuing, doubly pluralistic, account of human rights is one that, it is claimed, both makes best sense of the contemporary human rights culture and reveals the strong continuities between that culture and the natural rights tradition.

Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2020

Much ink has been spilt and hairs split in the battle between orthodox and political conceptions of human rights. No doubt, much in the confrontational approaches has been clarifying. There is a wide array of collected volumes and articles that illuminate obscure angles, pros and cons. 1 But since John Rawls made explicit a seminal conception of international human rights in his Oxford Amnesty Lecture in 1993 we have also had a fair share of straw-figures and shadow-boxing between misrepresented positions. The recurrent points of contention are: whether a political-not-metaphysical conception of international rights is necessarily an amoral one; whether all elements in a human rights conception should mirror moral ones or whether they are best understood as part of a philosophy of international law (Buchanan, 2013; Raz, 2010); whether 'political' necessarily implies that we can make universal assessments of human harm without moral standards, without 'dignity' as moral standing (Luban, 2015), or without moral recognition in a discursive practice of rights (Benhabib, 2013); also, whether the subject of duties for universal rights should be the states, or any agent whatsoever; whether the political view must lead to maximalism about the list of human rights; whether the political account of human rights can be claimed for human rights politics by women's groups and other local activists (Ackerly, 2018); whether a practice-based conception can be critical, progressive and aspirational (Moyn, 2018); or whether statist human rights are just enough and not a distraction from real cosmopolitan justice (Beitz & Goodin, 2011; Song, 2019). The purpose of this volume is not to add up to the pile of confrontational accounts. On contrast, we wanted to mark the 10 th anniversary of the publication of Charles Beitz's The Idea of Human Rights (Beitz, 2009)-perhaps the best articulated and detailed elaboration of this political turn, as an occasion to take stock of this decade of developments and to figure out new challenges ahead. According to the political conception defended by Beitz, human rights are best understood as an evolving practice and, consequently, the public doctrine that articulates its purpose can only be conceived as a work in progress. Beitz's own CONTACT David Álvarez

papers.ssrn.com

This paper defends several highly revisionary theses about human rights. §1 shows that the phrase “human rights” refers to two distinct types of moral claims. §§2-3 argue that several longstanding problems in human rights theory and practice can be solved if, and only if, the concept of a “human right” is replaced by two more exact concepts: International human rights: moral claims sufficient to warrant coercive domestic and international social protection. Domestic human rights: moral claims sufficient to warrant coercive domestic social protection but only non-coercive international action. §3 then argues that because coercion is central to both types of human right, and coercion is a matter of justice, the traditional view of human rights – that they are normative entitlements prior to and independent of substantive theories of justice – is incorrect. Human rights must instead be seen as emerging from substantive theories of domestic and international justice. Finally, §4 uses this reconceptualization to show that only a few very minimal claims about international human rights are presently warranted. Because international human rights are rights of international justice, but theorists of international justice disagree widely about the demands of international justice, much more research on international justice is needed – and much greater agreement about international justice should be reached – before anything more than a very minimal list of international human rights can be justified.

Discussions on human rights tend to be misleading because they lend themselves to taken for granted assumptions: all people are human, so, of course, everybody has human rights. Such assumptions project human rights as natural or even God given. Human rights are obvious because they are assumed to be natural and imply that human rights have always been in existence. If this supposedly obvious truism was an internalised consciousness among all people, the ongoing violations of human rights would not occur. In a sense, it could be argued that it is precisely the taken for granted assumptions about human rights that allow for human rights violations to continue. Notwithstanding, when violations, anomalies or stark aberrations of human rights occur, public awareness of the ongoing violations of human rights is raised. It is, thus, important to theoretically interrogate such taken for granted assumptions about human rights in order to substantially inform understandings and hopefully prevent further violations of human rights. At the same time, though, considerations of human rights also tend to be located within the discourses of legal theory, and political, moral and ethical philosophy, as will be shown in this chapter. In these ways, it is argued; human rights become perceived as related to matters of the law, and more about abstract and complex ideas about the nature and purposes of human life and forms of human development through political systems of government, rather than being about the daily and personal experiences of ordinary people. Whilst, human rights are matters of the law, tied integrally to political systems of government and deeply implicated in moral, political and ethical philosophy, human rights are also matters of the conditions of people's lives. Human rights are also about the ways in which people, on a daily basis, experience their humanity and their worlds.