Human Rights and Ethical Reasoning: Capabilities, Conventions and Spheres of Public Action (original) (raw)

Human Rights and Capabilities: A Program for a Critical Sociology of Law

Critical Sociology

This article sets out the fecundity of the Capability Approach for a sociology of human rights. The author endeavors to show that four difficulties can be successfully overcome. (1) The first is epistemological in nature. Human rights are often presented as legal norms. By relying on the Putman/Habermas debate, the author maintains that Sen’s epistemology is Putnamian, allowing us to treat human rights a system of values (rather than as a system of norms), thereby enabling the construction of a system of evaluation (the “goal rights system”) that is neither consequentialist nor deontological. This system is open to public deliberation and can thus take into account the systems of evaluation of participants (in addition to that of the observer). This epistemological basis serves to remove the other obstacles. (2) By defining the individual in terms of “capabilities”, Sen avoids a methodological individualism that would produce an under-socialized version of the individual. (3) He inc...

The construction of human rights

Manchester University Press eBooks, 2010

The construction of human rights: dominant approaches 19 T he idea of human rights covers a complex and fragmentary terrain. As R. J. Vincent comments near the beginning of his work on human rights in international relations, 'human rights' is a readily used term that has become a 'staple of world politics', the meaning of which is by no means self-evident (1986: 7). After glossing the term as the 'idea that humans have rights' (1986: 7)-a deceptively simple approach-Vincent notes that this is a profoundly contested territory, philosophically as well as politically. This is not surprising, as notions of human rights draw indirectly or directly on some of our most deeply embedded presumptions and reference-points-for those of us in liberal democracies, particularly those cosmologies concerning the nature of the person and of political community. Questions about and concepts of the human as individual, of what is right, the state, justice, freedom, equality, and so on, flicker like a constellation of stars just off the edge of our fields of analysis-fading in and out, holding much, promising or claimed as anchorage, yet elusive and obscure. For many, the assertion of human rights has become a kind of repository of secular virtue-a declaration of the sacred in the absence of the divine. In the Western liberal democracies, human rights are claimed as political home or as a principal 'instrument of struggle' by the libertarian right, by liberals of various persuasions, by socialists who feel the traditional socialist agenda has been overtaken by events and by 'post-liberal democrats'. To declare in a debate that the matter at hand involves rights can be to 'trump' discussion, drawing the limits beyond which exchange may not go, in a way that Ronald Dworkin (1977, 1984) probably did not intend. The language of rights thus carries great power while being potentially deeply divided against itself. The purpose of this chapter is to draw attention to some of the orders of thought that dominate human rights promotion and shape the meaning of this powerful, complex and in some ways contradictory tool of rights and 'rights talk'. In particular, I want to underline the limitations of these orders of thought, the narrowness of some of their central categories and the disfiguring M. Anne Brown-9781526121110

Toward a Political Conception of Human Rights

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.

'Human Rights do not exist': thinking about and beyond the existence of human rights

Australian Journal of Human Rights, 2023

This article examines the critical positions taken by two prominent figures of the twentieth-century philosophical tradition, Panajotis Kondylis and Gilles Deleuze, regarding the existence of human rights. In their ways, both thinkers identify a problem with the (non)existence of human rights, particularly with human rights' invocation of universal or eternal values. According to Deleuze, this all-encompassing, universalist language of human rights promotes a problematic way of thinking that 'thinks' in abstraction. For Kondylis, human rights do not exist, as their universalist claims are a matter of political exploitation and/or conceptual confusion. By focusing on the interplay between nonexistence and 'sham' or 'abstract existence', this article aims to critically examine our ways of thinking, in terms of human rights or beyond them, and how such a problematisation may pave the way for further discussions regarding the (non)place of human rights in our contemporary and future state of affairs.

The very idea of rights: a critique of human rights discourse

This short paper, which engages critically with rights discourse, is a rewritten section of Rites of the Nomads —a longer paper that was written several years back for an animal rights conference — that aims to clarify my views on rights, law and state power. I refer primarily to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as critical legal studies (seen through the work of Costas Douzinas) to argue that the relationship between rights, law and the state is best seen as the reverse of how it is presented within liberal democratic frameworks: instead of the state enforcing rights via law, rights conceal the enactment of law as the defence and enhancement of state power..

Reconstructing Human Rights: A Pragmatic and Pluralist Inquiry in Global Ethics

2016

'Now architect, now archaeologist, now a man whose hand is in the past. Somebody is made to face the changes; somebody is built to last. What do you know, still living so young? Tomorrow is no burden; time can be overcome.' -The Constantines, "Time Can Be Overcome" I am a human being. You are a human being. We are human. These simple propositions have become ethical claims of the highest order. They express expectations of recognition, concern and equality. Those expectations take social form as rights: rights that protect us from torture, from arbitrary imprisonment, from hunger and deprivation, which entitle us to standing within our communities, participation in politics, productive work, engagement in cultural life, privacy sufficient to live without undue interference and many other protections and privileges. In promising these protections and privileges human rights redefine political relationships by altering how we see ourselves and how we share our lives with others. Human rights are a transformative political idea, although one that many of us now take for granted. Yet, if we take the ethical value of human rights seriously then we need to recognise the profound claims they make along with the radical social changes they demand. Human rights assert that everyone (whether alone or in community with others) counts for something; that we are owed respect and voice whomever we are, irrespective of existing hierarchies of protection and privilege; and they assert that political authority is only legitimate when everyone counts. These profound claims force us to reconsider the known coordinates of social justice and in doing so upsets the given order. Human rights are disruptive.

An Ethics of Human Rights: Two Interrelated Misunderstandings

2020

It should be noted, however, that these discussions of collectivities often treat the group as an individual through the use of methodological individualism. In discussions about more than one person, the language of the individual continues to be used. Language hampers the ability to understand the complexity of group dynamics. It seems impossible to look inside the group, and at the relationship