Human Rights, Human Dignity, and Power (original) (raw)
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Human Rights Human Dignity and Power OUP volume draft revised to share
This paper explores the connections between human rights, human dignity, and power. The idea of human dignity is omnipresent in human rights discourse, but its meaning and point is not always clear. It is standardly used in two ways, to refer to (a) a normative status of persons that makes their treatment in terms of human rights a proper response, and (b) a social condition of persons in which their human rights are fulfilled. This paper pursues three tasks. First, it provides an analysis of the content and an interpretation of the role of the idea of human dignity in current human rights discourse. The interpretation includes a pluralist view of human interests and dignity that avoids a narrow focus on rational agency. Second, this paper characterizes the two aspects of human dignity in terms of capabilities. Certain general human capabilities are among the facts that ground status-dignity, and the presence of certain more specific capabilities constitutes condition-dignity. Finally, this paper explores how the pursuit of human rights and human dignity links to distributions and uses of power. Since capabilities are a form of power, and human rights are in part aimed at respecting and promoting capabilities, human rights involve empowerment. Exploring the connections between human rights, capabilities, and empowerment provides resources to defend controversial human rights such as the right to democratic political participation, and to respond to worries about the feasibility of their fulfillment. This paper also argues that empowerment must be coupled with solidaristic concern in order to respond to unavoidable facts of social dependency and vulnerability. A concluding section identifies some commonalities and differences with the approach to the ontological underpinnings of human rights presented by Carol Gould in her contribution to this volume.
How Should Human Dignity be a Ground for Human Rights? A Preliminary Exploration1
Ratio Publica, 2023
This paper explores the possible relations between human dignity and human rights and identifies the appropriate account of the relations. There are at least three crucial issues concerning human dignity as a ground for human rights. The first is whether dignity is a useful notion for human rights. Some say dignity is a useless or incoherent notion by itself, while others say dignity cannot justify human rights because it cannot demonstrate why people have the rights equally. The paper rejects both of these. The second issue is about the connection between the two notions. Some say that support for dignity does not entail support for human rights, while others say that the support for human rights does not involve support for human dignity. Through examination, the paper supports the statement that the support for human rights entails the support for human dignity (primarily, the article supports the justification that grounds human rights, at least in part, on dignity). The third issue is that of grounding: How does human dignity ground human rights? Some claim capacities are appropriate for understanding dignity, while others claim that we should add vulnerabilities in understanding the notion when it grounds human rights. The paper offers a dualistic view that accommodates both by treating interests concerning agency and equality as grounds for human rights. Finally, the paper elucidates the advantages of dualism compared to the capacity-based pluralism recently posited by Pablo Gilabert.
Constructing dignity: Human rights as a praxis of egalitarian freedom
Journal of Human Rights, 2018
Familiar philosophical accounts of the relationship between human rights and human dignity treat dignity as the foundation of human rights. These accounts get the historical and conceptual relationship between rights and dignity wrong and obscure how power and politics shape human dignity in practice. The article sketches an alternative view that treats the emancipatory praxis of human rights as constitutive of a distinctive conception of dignity as egalitarian freedom. This political account clarifies the historical and conceptual relationships between dignity and human rights in ways that provide powerful critical leverage on some obdurate controversies in the field. Additionally, it makes the analysis of power and struggle central to our understanding of dignity and human rights at a political moment when such an analysis proves indispensable.
Oxímora. Revista Internacional de Ética y Política, 2016
This paper will evaluate the convenience of using the legal concept of human dignity in the human rights discourse and its effectiveness to address injustice in a twenty-first century democratic society. This article will argue that the difficulty of defining human dignity does not diminish its merits and allows it to be both solid and adaptable to new challenges. Then, this paper will argue that human dignity is a powerful concept due to its capacity to bring change and modernise society and will conclude that there is a strong relationship between time, human dignity, human rights and democracy.
Human rights and human dignity: An analytic critique of non-Western conceptions of human rights
The American Political Science Review, 1982
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The dignity approach to human rights and the impaired autonomy objection
Human Affairs, 2019
There is little need to argue for the importance of human rights (HRs) in our world. If one looks at the role they play today, it is hard to deny that their impact has increased beyond anything the drafters of the 1948 Universal Declaration could have hoped or imagined. However, even though human rights today have a far greater impact on politics than in the past, the philosophical reflection that surrounds them has had a less fortunate history. It is doubtful whether we are today in a better position than we were in 1948 to answer any of the philosophical questions surrounding them, including, and perhaps most crucially, the question about their foundation. Why are human rights standards—of whatever sort—that we should adopt, or even just take seriously? The first two parts of this paper summarize my recent work on the above question (Caranti, 2017) and the third takes it a step further. I will 1) show why the main orientations in the contemporary philosophy of human rights all fai...
Christ University Law Journal, 2012
This paper seeks to contrast the language of human rights with capabilities approach conceptualized by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. While capabilities approach is an effective way of comprehending and mplementing the rights guaranteed to people, language of human rights remains the essential pre-requisite for the development and enhancement of people’s capabilities. While both these frameworks for justice operate within the western liberal paradigm, capabilities approach fills in the gaps of modern human rights discourse. The new idea of justice that accords a central place to human dignity mandates that the human rights entrenched in the Constitution be read as capabilities. The desperate vacuum that exists between the promises of law and realities of existence can only be bridged by institutionalizing a blend of rights and capabilities in the pursuit of justice. The paper argues that the language of human rights and that of capabilities ought to supplement and complement each ...
Contributions from the capabilities approach to the human rights practice
V. 13, n. 02, 2020
The article analyses the contributions offered from the capabilities approach to the human rights theory. The capabilities approach is a theory developed by Martha Nussbaum, US-American philosopher, that analyses the basic capabilities (alternative combinations of functionings that a person have the possibility to achieve) every human should achieve in order to live a life with dignity. The article demonstrates that Nussbaum´s theory contributes greatly for the development of human rights, by offering a list of specific capabilities that should be guaranteed to every human being by the State, with particular concern for vulnerable groups such as women, children and elderly. Even though the theory presents indisputable contributions, criticism is also presented, based upon mostly its essentialist point of view. In order to achieve the proposed objective, the methodology applied was bibliographical review.