The Multivocity of Human Rights Discourse (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Concept of Rights in Contemporary Human Rights Discourse
Ratio Juris, 2010
In a variety of disciplines, there exists a consensus that human rights are individual claim rights that all human beings possess simply as a consequence of being human. That consensus seems to me to obscure the real character of the concept and hinder the progress of discussion. I contend that rather than thinking of human rights in the first instance as "claim rights" possessed by individuals, we should regard human rights as higher order norms that articulate standards of legitimacy for sociopolitical and legal institutions. Not the least of our difficulties when we think about rights is that, despite their ubiquity in our discourse, it is unclear just what a right is. (Weinreb 1992, 281) * I would like to thank Ana Vrdoljak, Gianluigi Palombella, and Nicholas White for helpful criticisms and comments. 1 As has become clear to me from our conversations, Palombella 2000 argues for an account of fundamental rights that is very similar to my account of human rights.
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
'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.
HUMAN RIGHTS FROM AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW POINT
The historical progression of the idea of 'Rights' and 'Citizenship' are embedded in a narrative, which postures itself as a Universalist in nature. The role of 'State' in such a narrative account cannot be over-stressed. The concept of 'Rights' in such a context comes across as an act of dispensation. Dispensation of 'Justice', such an account and its discussion problematises the almost universally accepted notions regarding 'Human Rights'. In order to do so, some of the major epistemological shifts are identified to analyze the 'accepted' continuum of human thought and behaviour which are universal in nature. It would be useful here to question the 'universal' tenor of this kind of exercise in modern social science theories where nature has been 'pushed' in to the periphery. The MDG envisioned, must overcome this academic and practical resistance to identify the crux of international relation.
Towards a Philosophy of Human 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.
Relativism and Human Rights. A Theory of Pluralist Universalism
Springer-Nature, 2022
Almost a decade has passed since the publication of this book. A work originally conceived for my doctoral thesis, to read back the original version provoked a sense of surprise but also of distance. Along with the pleasure of unexpected connections comes a feeling of estrangement for some of its elaborations. I have therefore intended to remedy to this difficulty with an overall revision of this text belonging to an early phase of my formation. After all this time, previous interests have found new syntheses in current methodological transformations and ideas. I have therefore written new chapters and reorganized again several chapters and some of the fundamental theses of the original version. The result has been a new book, a rethinking of the philosophical core of a theory of human rights. An important addition has considered the duplicity of the point of observation in which human rights have been justified. On the one hand, human rights have been argued in terms of formal liberties, that is, as necessary presuppositions to justify rational action through discursive practice; on the other hand, the idea of human rights has been argued in terms of applicative standards of judgment. The mediation between these two levels, then, has required a rethinking of the theory through the consideration of the concept of human dignity as a general principle of the system of human rights (therefore not as a right among the others). Human dignity, indeed, provides an orientation to the use of reflective judgment in human rights. If something resilient to time is therefore in these pages, this is undoubtedly in an attempt to reconsider some of the points left suspended in the first edition. There is no doubt that a philosophical discourse on human rights cannot avoid considering what is truth (what I define as “experiential truth”), or what are the conditions of normative validity for individual agency. Human rights represent, in fact, a self-fulfilled philosophical discourse, and even more, a discourse requiring the contribution of a multiplicity of levels of analysis. In the following pages I will consider the idea that human rights express an epochal and revolutionary character of modernity. They represent, that is, elements of self-reflection of the modern man in the process of defining himself as a worthy subject of equal respect.
On Human Rights: Two Simple Remarks
Critical Legal Thinking; forthcoming in Costas Douzinas and Conor Gearty eds, The Meanings of Human Rights: The Philosophy and Social Theory of Rights, Cambridge University Press (2013)