History, Human Rights, and Globalization

An illustrative comparison of human rights in 1948 and the contemporary period, attempting to gauge the impact of globalization on changes in the content of human rights (e.g., collective rights, women's rights, right to a healthy environment), major abusers and guarantors of human rights (e.g., state actors, transnational corporations, social movements), and alternative justifications of human rights (e.g., pragmatic agreement, moral intuitionism, overlapping consensus, cross‐cultural dialogue).     

Is Today's International Human Rights System a Global Governance Regime?

Enthusiasts of the idea of globalization often view international human rights institutions as part of an emerging global governance regime. They claim that these institutions illustrate how state sovereignty is being diminished. This paper looks at the international system for thepromotion and protection of human rights aspart of normative globalization. It arguesthat this system does not constitute a systemof global governance, although in some areas itcomes close.     

Human dignity – the foundation of political human rights? Empirical research among youth in Germany

This article focuses on political human rights and on the empirically assessed legitimation of these rights. This research considers the rights of refugees, the active and passive right to vote, and the right of protest. Given that the research is empirical research, respondents are requested to express agreement, disagreement or neutrality. The assumption is that contextual factors influence people’s assessment of rights. One contextual factor is, firstly, the concept of human dignity. International human rights covenants regard human dignity as the very foundation of all rights. That said, the concept of human dignity is subject to different understandings and – certainly in the past – the understanding of what constitutes human dignity has varied. Dignity can be related to the appreciation of the person given by others, to the moral behaviour of a person, and it can be understood as inherently related to the individual as a human being. It is this last understanding that forms the basis of modern declarations of human rights. Furthermore, the respondents’ value orientations and religious beliefs, along with society’s socio-political perception, will be examined to ascertain whether these factors have any influence on respondents’ attitudes towards political rights. The key question is: does human dignity influence people’s view of the legitimacy of political rights and do other factors also count? The empirical analysis was undertaken done with German youth (N=2244). Findings show that the concept of inherent human dignity is a strong predictor for respondents’ attitudes towards political rights, but that it is not the unique predictor; relevant concepts are the value orientation of youth and their socio-political orientation. The significance of religious beliefs as a predictor is low.     

A sufficiently political orthodox conception of human rights

The traditional conception of human rights, or the orthodox conception (OC), has, over the last few years, been vigorously challenged by the political conception (PC) of human rights. I have two main aims in this paper: the first is to articulate and evaluate the main points of disagreement between the OC and the PC in order to provide a clearer picture of what is at stake in the debate. The second is to argue that the OC has the resources to respond to the PC's most challenging criticism; namely that it is not sufficiently political.     

Are Human Rights Redundant in the Ethical Codes of Psychologists?

The codes of ethics and conduct of a number of psychology bodies explicitly refer to human rights, and the American Psychological Association recently expanded the use of the construct when it amended standard 1.02 of the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. What is unclear is how these references to human rights should be interpreted. In this article I examine the historical development of human rights and associated constructs and the contemporary meaning of human rights. As human rights are generally associated with law, morality, or religion, I consider to which of forms of these references most likely refer. I conclude that these references in ethical codes are redundant and that it would be preferable not to refer to human rights in codes. Instead, the profession should acknowledge human rights as a separate and complimentary norm system that governs the behavior of psychologists and should ensure that they have adequate knowledge of human rights and encourage them to promote human rights.     

Should Inherent Human Dignity Be Considered Intrinsically Heuristic?

What are “human rights” supposed to protect? According to most human rights doctrines, including most notably the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), human rights aim to protect “human dignity.” But what this concept amounts to and what its source is remain unclear. According to Glenn Hughes (2011), human rights theorists ought to consider human dignity as an “intrinsically heuristic concept,” whose content is partially understood but is not fully determined. In this comment, I criticize Hughes's account. On my view, understanding inherent human dignity as an intrinsically heuristic concept tethers it to an “indeterminateness of sense,” which leaves it open to exploitation from theorists unsympathetic to the moral salience of rights and what rights are supposed to protect.     

GOD'S VELVETEEN RABBIT

This article lays out a central argument of Wolterstorff's book, which I call the Argument from Under-Respect . That argument, I contend, is central to Wolterstorff's thought about wrongs and human rights. Close attention to the argument raises questions about whether Wolterstorff's account of rights can explain what a theory of rights must include: why violating rights wrongs the rights-bearer.     

Human Rights and Religion: A Sociological Perspective

This essay aims to review mainstream literature and research perspectives on the sociology of human rights with the further focus on relationship between human rights and religion. We consider the challenges of late engagement of sociology with human rights and current narratives of the relationship of human rights and religion that encompass normativity as the central category of historically oriented sociology. We discuss the contribution of two empirical research mainstreams on human rights and religion and focus on a new field of study—sociology of religious freedom. A detailed new agenda for sociological research on human rights and religion is explored in the final part of our assessment.     

Human rights without human supremacism*

Early defenders of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights invoked species hierarchy: human beings are owed rights because of our discontinuity with and superiority to animals. Subsequent defenders avoided species supremacism, appealing instead to conditions of embodied subjectivity and corporeal vulnerability we share with animals. In the past decade, however, supremacism has returned in work of the new ‘dignitarians’ who argue that human rights are grounded in dignity, and that human dignity requires according humans a higher status than animals. Against the dignitarians, I argue that defending human rights on the backs of animals is philosophically suspect and politically self-defeating.     

JUSTICE AS INHERENT RIGHTS: A RESPONSE TO MY COMMENTATORS

The critical comments by my fellow symposiasts on my book, Justice: Rights and Wrongs , have provided me with the opportunity to clarify parts of my argument and to correct some misunderstandings; they have also helped me see more clearly than I did before the import of some parts of my argument. In his comments, Paul Weithman points out features of the right order conception of justice that I had not noticed. They have also prodded me to clarify in what way rights are trumps; and both his comments and Bernstein's have prodded me to clarify certain aspects of the theistic account of human rights that I offered. Attridge's comments lead me to see that I was perhaps over-zealous in emphasizing the objective aspects of the semantic range of dikaiosunê as used in the New Testament and downplaying the subjective aspects. And O'Donovan's comments have provided me with the opportunity to make clear that my account of rights is not an immunities account that presupposes nominalism, and to emphasize the ways in which it is not an asocial individualistic account.     

Human and peoples' rights: social representations among Cameroonian students

Social representations of human and peoples' rights were studied among Cameroonian university students (N = 666) with a questionnaire based on the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and Duties. The respondents were asked how important and how well realized they regarded the 39 human and peoples' rights to be. A 13-factor model provided the best fit with Cameroonian students' perceptions of human and peoples' rights. Taken as a whole, our results are in line with previous quantitative studies on human rights, confirming structural similarity but also country-specific variation in the aggregation of specific rights. Moreover, our data showed that Cameroonian students value human and peoples' rights highly (M = 6.18), whereas their fulfillment is not regarded as highly (M = 5.09). Same law for all, equality and freedom, and right to work and living were highly appreciated but lowly realized rights. Higher than average in importance and realization were right to education and self-fulfillment, right to marriage and property, peoples' social and political basic rights and right to life and safety. Low in importance and realization were peoples' right to their country's natural resources and independence, right to meetings, and right to express opinion. Women appreciated the rights more than men and thought of their rights as better realized compared to men. We suggest that when women say that their rights are better fulfilled than men do, it is in comparison with the older generation, who are still very dependent on men. Nowadays, thanks to education and urbanization, young women have wider choices or opportunities for marriage and jobs. Men may feel frustrated in the context of political liberalization because the freedoms are more theoretical than fulfilled; the economic crises and cultural changes have hindered their economic domination and their prerogatives.     

Religion and the Human Rights Idea

Three recent books focus, in different ways, on the idea of human rights and its relation to religion and religious ethics. All three books discussed here address criticisms of the human rights idea and seek to establish the relationship of religion and human rights with regard to the field of policy. The present discussion begins with an overview that places these three books in the larger context of the development of the human rights idea and its historical relationship with religion. It then turns to Little's book, next to the collection of essays edited by Twiss, Simion, and Petersen, which is described internally as a Festschrift for Little, and then to Hogan's book, and in the final section it explores comparisons among the books.     

Development ethics – Why? What? How? A formulation of the field

The paper assesses the rationale, contributions, structure, and challenges of the field of development ethics. Processes of social and economic transformation involve great risks and costs and great opportunities for gain, but the benefits, costs, and risks are typically hugely unevenly and inequitably distributed, as is participation in specifying what they are and their relative importance. The ethics of development examines the benefits, costs, risks, formulations, participation, and options. The paper outlines a series of ways of characterizing such work, arguments for and against its importance, and some of its major sources and contributions, especially from the interdisciplinary stream of work represented over several decades by Denis Goulet. Definitions are diverse since the work covers many different intersections of practice and theorizing, at multiple levels. The paper considers and replies to arguments against discussing development ethics: the claim that it involves only endless proliferation of different opinions, is an expensive luxury that undermines long-run development, is superfluous if one already works with the capability approach or the human rights tradition, or never has influence. Finally, it presents suggestions for how development ethics thinking can have increased impact, with reference to incorporation in policy analysis and planning methods, professional codes and training, and to its intellectual location and communication strategies. The field should articulate the methodological pragmatism which much of it has adopted, consistent with its required role as a practice-oriented interdisciplinary meeting ground.     

Welfare Rights and Conflicts of Rights

The fact that welfare rights – rights to food, shelter and medical care – will conflict with one another is often taken to be good reason to exclude welfare rights from the catalogue of genuine rights. Rather than respond to this objection by pointing out that all rights conflict, welfare rights proponents need to take the conflicts objection seriously. The existence of potentially conflicting and more weighty normative considerations counts against a claim’s status as a genuine right. To think otherwise would be to threaten the peremptory force – and hence the analytical integrity – of rights. The conflicts objection is made more pressing once we have conceded that welfare rights give people entitlements to what are potentially scarce goods. I argue that welfare rights can survive the conflicts objection if, and only if, we take scarcity into account in the framing of a given welfare right. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Nuffield Political Theory Workshop in Oxford and the Canadian Philosophical Association Congress 2006 at York University. I am grateful to Adam Swift, David Miller, Idil Boran, Sarah McCallum and two anonymous referees for their comments, and to the Economic and Social Research Council for research funding.     

Religion,Human Rights,and Neo‐liberalism in a Post‐Humanist Era

In a modern and secularized world, churches and religious groups that fight in the public sphere for social justice justify these actions in the name of defending human rights. This has been the path taken to express in non‐religious language what they understand to be a God‐given mission. Based on the distinction between civil rights, political rights, and social rights, which make up the set of human rights, this article analyzes the relationship between the notion of religious mission and the struggle for human rights; how neoliberal ideology, in an anti‐humanist perspective, criticizes the notion of social rights and social justice with the denial of any human right above the laws of the market; and the challenges that this neoliberal ideology poses for the justification of the social and political action of religious groups and institutions in the contemporary globalized world with a growing post/anti‐humanist culture.     

International Justice,Human Rights and Neutrality

A number of theorists have tried to resolve the tension between a western-oriented liberal scheme of human rights and an account that accommodates different political systems and constitutional ideals than the liberal one. One important way the tension has been addressed is through a “neutral” or tolerant, notion of human rights, as present in the work of Rawls, Scanlon and Buchanan. In this paper I argue that neutrality cannot by itself explain the difference between rights considered appropriate for liberal states and rights considered to be human rights proper. The central arguments used by neutralist theorists presuppose, rather than justify, this differential treatment. Instead, that difference can be understood only by reference to the purpose of human rights as distinct from the constitutional rights of a liberal state. This requires us to reassess the point and purpose of a theory of international justice, in contrast to justice for a domestic and politically separate society. In the case of a theorist like Rawls, human rights represent guides to the foreign policy of a liberal state, rather than to principles by which all states are expected to abide. That is because of Rawls’ acceptance that no common, authoritative, third-party, institutions capable of imposing duties on all agents uniformly exist or can exist. This also makes his theory inherently conservative about human rights, given that they are simply to act as a guide to which states can be treated as legitimate when it comes to liberal foreign policy: those that possess institutions that can be said to represent a peoples, rather than being imposed through violence. This standard is lower than the ideal set of rights extended to all in a liberal society. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

作为一项权利的人的尊严

The concept of human dignity and the relationship between dignity and human rights have been important subjects in contemporary international academia. This article first analyzes the different understandings of the concept of dignity, which has left great influences in history (including the “theory of attribution-dignity”, the “theory of autonomy-dignity” or the “theory of moral completeness/achievement-dignity”, and the “theory of end-in-itself-dignity”); it then exposes the obvious defects of these modes of understanding; finally, it tries to define dignity as a moral right to be free from insult. Meanwhile, the relationship between human dignity and human rights is clarified as a result of this research: Rather than being the foundation of human rights, human dignity is one of human rights. The idea of dignity nevertheless has a particular status in ethics in that it embodies a kind of core moral concern, representing a basic demand rooted in the human self or individuality, and hence representing an important aspect of human rights. We may anticipate that sooner or later, the idea of human dignity will become, together with other human rights, the only intangible cultural heritage of human society. __________ Translated by Zhang Lin from Zhexue yanjiu 哲学研究 (Philosophical Researches), 2008, (6): 85–92     

Rawls on Human Rights: A Review Essay

In this essay, I first evaluate the conceptual analysis of human rights by Wilfried Hinsch and Markus Stepanians. Next I criticize Allen Buchanan’s claim that Rawls did not address basic human interests/capabilities theories of human nature. I argue Buchanan is doubly mistaken when he claims that John Rawls sought to avoid such theories because they are comprehensive doctrines. Then I evaluate David Reidy’s defense of Rawls, while questioning his efforts to show how Rawls’s list of human rights could be expanded. Finally, I accept James Nickel’s argument that Rawls has tied human rights too closely to intervention on their behalf. However, I reject his, and by implication Rawls’s, refusal to accept a two-tiered approach to human rights.     

Ethical Assumptions in Economic Theory: Some Lessons from the History of Credit and Bankruptcy

This paper evaluates the economic assumptions of economic theory via an examination of the capitalist transformation of creditor–debtor relations in the 18th century. This transformation enabled masses of people to obtain credit without moral opprobrium or social subordination. Classical 18th century economics had the ethical concepts to appreciate these facts. Ironically, contemporary economic theory cannot. I trace this fault to its abstract representations of freedom, efficiency, and markets. The virtues of capitalism lie in the concrete social relations and social meanings through which capital and commodities are exchanged. Contrary to laissez faire capitalism, the conditions for sustaining these concrete capitalist formations require limits on freedom of contract and the scope of private property rights.     

Kant on International Relations

This paper explores some of the problems which arise from Immanuel Kant’s commitment to both human rights and the rights of states. Michael Doyle believed it was contradictory for Kant to defend both human rights and non-intervention by states in the affairs of other states, but I argue that for Kant there was no such contradiction, and I explore Kant’s claim that the state is “a moral personality.” I also discuss Kant’s belief that “Nature guarantees” that perpetual peace will obtain, and I consider Kant as a teleologist.