GLOBAL ETHICS AND HUMAN RIGHTS: A REFLECTION

This paper examines the contributions that the international human rights community can make to the definition and framing of a practically effective global ethic, especially in light of ongoing concerns about social and economic justice, environmental issues, and systematic abuses of vulnerable populations. The principal argument is that the human rights movement in all of its dimensions (moral, legal, political) provides the pivotal foundation for a practicable global ethic now and for the foreseeable future. Evidence for the truth of this claim is discerned in the movement's contemporary efforts to intersect explicitly with other areas of international law and politics. Examples adduced include developments with respect to the rights of indigenous peoples, decision making about the environment, and transitional justice.     

STRUCTURING GLOBAL DEMOCRACY: POLITICAL COMMUNITIES, UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS, AND TRANSNATIONAL REPRESENTATION

Abstract: The emergence of cross-border communities and transnational associations requires new ways of thinking about the norms involved in democracy in a globalized world. Given the significance of human rights fulfillment, including social and economic rights, I argue here for giving weight to the claims of political communities while also recognizing the need for input by distant others into the decisions of global governance institutions that affect them. I develop two criteria for addressing the scope of democratization in transnational contexts— common activities and impact on basic human rights —and argue for their compatibility. I then consider some practical implications for institutional transformation and design, including new forms of transnational representation .     

THE CONCEPT OF HUMAN DIGNITY AND THE REALISTIC UTOPIA OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Abstract: Human rights developed in response to specific violations of human dignity, and can therefore be conceived as specifications of human dignity, their moral source. This internal relationship explains the moral content and moreover the distinguishing feature of human rights: they are designed for an effective implementation of the core moral values of an egalitarian universalism in terms of coercive law. This essay is an attempt to explain this moral‐legal Janus face of human rights through the mediating role of the concept of human dignity. This concept is due to a remarkable generalization of the particularistic meanings of those “dignities” that once were attached to specific honorific functions and memberships. In spite of its abstract meaning, “human dignity” still retains from its particularistic precursor concepts the connotation of depending on the social recognition of a status—in this case, the status of democratic citizenship. Only membership in a constitutional political community can protect, by granting equal rights, the equal human dignity of everybody.     

IMMIGRATION, NATIONALISM, AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Abstract: Michael Walzer and David Miller defend the authority of democratic states to determine who will be allowed entry and membership. In support of this view they have claimed that the domestic solidarity necessary for social justice is threatened by the unregulated influx of outsiders. This empirical thesis proves to be false when applied to the United States, where heavy Latino and Latina immigration is more likely to increase civic solidarity than to diminish it. Seen in this light, the positions of Jürgen Habermas and Carol Gould, giving human rights priority over democratic sovereignty in decisions about membership, cannot be criticized as utopian. Liberal philosophers can also defend open borders as a way to give oppressed peoples representation inside powerful countries where state decisions often threaten access to essential resources and basic freedoms in their home countries.     

COMPARATIVE ETHICS, A COMMON MORALITY, AND HUMAN RIGHTS

This essay is a brief attempt to summarize and evaluate the contributions that Democracy and Tradition makes to the field of comparative ethics. It is argued that the potential impact of these contributions would be strengthened by engagement with the common morality already imbedded in international human rights norms.     

NICHOLAS WOLTERSTORFF'S JUSTICE: RIGHTS AND WRONGS: AN INTRODUCTION

This introduction sets the stage for four papers on Nicholas Wolterstorff's Justice: Rights and Wrongs , written by Harold Attridge, Oliver O'Donovan, Richard Bernstein, and myself. In his book, Wolterstorff defends an account of human rights. The first section of this introduction distinguishes Wolterstorff's account of rights from the alternative account of rights against which he contends. The alternative account draws much of its power from a historical narrative according to which theory and politics supplanted earlier ways of thinking about justice. The second section sketches that narrative and Wolterstorff's counter-narrative. The third section draws together the main points of Wolterstorff's own account.     

INTRODUCTION: GLOBAL DEMOCRACY AND EXCLUSION

Abstract: Does democracy or popular sovereignty imply exclusion and drawing borders? And if so, what type of exclusion and borders, and what kind of justification can we give for them? Moreover, if democracy really requires some kind of exclusion, is global democracy then a paradoxical union of two contradictory ideals? Can we create a demos on the global level? The focus of this collection of essays is on this potential conflict and its underlying values.     

DOES HE PULL IT OFF? A THEISTIC GROUNDING OF NATURAL INHERENT HUMAN RIGHTS?

This paper focuses on two key issues in Nicholas Wolterstorff's Justice: Rights and Wrongs . It argues that Wolterstorff's theistic grounding of inherent rights is not successful. It also argues that Wolterstorff does not provide adequate criteria for determining what exactly these natural inherent rights are or criteria that can help us to evaluate competing and contradictory claims about these rights. However, most of Wolterstorff's book is not concerned with the theistic grounding of inherent rights. Instead, it is devoted to a detailed and rigorous articulation of the meaning and defense of a theory of justice as consisting of inherent rights and with showing why this theory of justice is superior to the alternative right order theories that Wolterstorff criticizes. The paper concludes that these accomplishments are not diminished even if Wolterstorff has failed to provide us with a satisfactory theistic grounding of his theory.     

GLOBAL BIOETHICS: TRANSNATIONAL EXPERIENCES AND ISLAMIC BIOETHICS

In the 1970s “bioethics” emerged as a new interdisciplinary discourse on medicine, health care, and medical technologies, primarily in Western, developed countries. The main focus was on how individual patients could be empowered to cope with the challenges of science and technology. Since the 1990s, the main source of bioethical problems is the process of globalization, particularly neo‐liberal market ideology. Faced with new challenges such as poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, hunger, pandemics, and organ trafficking the bioethical discourse of empowering individuals is no longer sufficient. Global bioethics nowadays is concerned with applying and implementing a universal ethical framework. Islamic bioethics has contributed to creating such framework (exemplified in the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights) while at the same time it is continuously articulating and interpreting this framework in specific settings and contexts.     

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.     

THE CONCEPT OF DIGNITY IN THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

This essay examines the function of the concept of human dignity (both as an inherent feature of human existence and as an ideal achievement) in the United Nations's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It explains why the key framers of the document affirmed an inherent human dignity in order to provide an explanatory basis for the validity of universal human rights while eschewing any religious or metaphysical justification for this affirmation. It argues that the key framers, while aware of the Christian anthropology informing the modern Western concept of the dignity of the person, grasped (1) that the Declaration, to be ratifiable, would need to be free of religious reference, and also (2) that the notion of inherency suffices to suggest heuristically not only a universal human nature but also, crucially, a transcendent reality in which all persons participate.     

Leave No Poor Behind:

Globalization is being celebrated in many circles as a distinctive achievement of our age, drawing peoples and societies more closely together and creating far greater wealth than any previous generations ever knew. While the first of these assertions is correct in the sense that societies and cultures are colliding, hitherto relatively closed horizons are opening up, and spaces and time are compressing, the second deserves critical interrogations. Using Africa's experience with globalization as a case study, this article argues that globalization be understood as an emerging preference for certain institutional and policy practices that are creating and coercively imposing pervasive but avoidable conditions of material deprivations on many societies. The article defends a motivational rationale anchored in the normative vision of socio‐economic and development rights as a way to mitigate the deleterious effects of unguarded globalization.     

Global ethics: dimensions and prospects

Global ethics is an emerging discipline which has not yet reached maturity. The main tasks before it to gain maturity are: first, to achieve a greater integration of various domains of enquiry all of which are concerned with global normative issues. At a general level this includes integrating global ethics with cosmopolitanism, global justice and human right discourse. At the level of areas of concern, there needs to be greater integration of various areas such as development, trade, environment and climate change. And it must grapple with the question of diversity within universality: how far can diversity of practices be accommodated within a culturally sensitive universal framework? Second, there is the question of finding a shared normative framework with respect to the diverse worldviews that may lie behind this: what degree and kind of convergence/consensus are worth working for? Third, there is the task of creating the conditions for its own wider acceptance, which should include taking the idea of global citizenship seriously.