The Politics of the Human (original) (raw)
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Towards a Politics for Human Rights: Ambiguous Humanity and Democratizing Rights
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2013
Human rights are a suspect project – this seems the only sensible starting point today. This suspicion, however, is not absolute and the desire to preserve and reform human rights persists for many of us. The most important contemporary critiques of human rights focus on the problematic consequences of the desire for universal rights. These criticisms are pursued with varying intensities, as some defenders of human rights are willing to accept elements of this critique in their reformulations, while staunch opponents remain wary of the desire to think and act in language of human rights because of the deep pathologies of rights-thinking as a political ethics. Yet, we hesitate to abandon human rights. In this paper, I look at the political critique of human rights in greater detail. I argue that an agonistic account drawing on the work of William Connolly and Bonnie Honig offers the best response to the most important contemporary critiques of human rights, and a clearer account of what it means to claim that human rights do valuable work. The key developments of this agonistic view of human rights are its focus on the ambiguity of “humanity” as a political identity, and the challenge to legitimate authority and membership that new rights claims make. In the end, human rights are defended as a universal political ethos focused on the pluralization and democratization of global politics.
'Achieved not given': human rights, critique and the need for strong foundations
In this article we focus critically on the normative foundations of the project outlined by Benjamin Gregg in The Human Rights State (2016). In developing our analysis of Gregg’s project, we consider it in the context of the inspiration it draws from the work of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière. We argue that Arendt does not give Gregg any robust support for his anti-foundationalism, and that Rancière’s politics of dissensus makes an uneasy ally for Gregg’s constructivism. We argue that we need strong moral foundations to motivate critique and ground valid construction, and that they need not draw us back into the authoritarianism so often associated with classical foundations on which human rights claims have sometimes relied. We suggest that the right kind of thin but strong moral foundations are most clearly articulated in the work of the critical theorist Rainer Forst, and that Forst’s constructivism and his emphasis on dissensus makes his perspective particularly compatible with Gregg’s project. In the final parts of the article, we expose what we see as the unacknowledged normative foundations of Gregg’s position. We conclude by briefly examining the practical significance of his neglect of those foundations and the moral context that are crucial for tackling the governance gap in business human rights issues.
Human Rights as Subjectivity: The Age of Rights and the Politics of Culture
Millennium - Journal of International Studies
This article seeks to open up the question of the foundation of human rights by reference not to their philosophical origins but their political function. I argue that attempts to ground human rights in objective fact (such as 'human nature') or in pure reason (as 'self-evident') are futile, but more importantly are unhelpful in the broader project of protecting those rights that are recognised as 'universal'. A more useful approach is to conceptualise human rights as a discourse in which the human being is constituted and reconstituted as the subject of rights. Allied with this theoretical analysis is the political project of establishing the conditions for meaningful conversation about human rights. More than any philosophical insight, this is the ultimate precondition for their recognition.
Humanity of Rights , 2022
Claudio Corradetti's Human rights and critical theory is an argument for the idea of pluralistic universalism. The purpose of the volume is to demonstrate that human rights are something epochal and revolutionary, something that was realized at a specific historical moment, modernity, through a process of self-reflection. Subjects attain an idea of themselves as subjects and at the same time as subjects of law. In the following pages, while accepting Corradetti's thesis on the revolutionary character of human rights, I will argue the anthropological foundation of such rights, under penalty of the artificiality of the law itself. I will show that the subject of these rights cannot be considered one-dimensional nor can the law be fully resolved only in its legal formulation. The revolution of law is possible above all because the way of thinking of the subject's self-reflection in the world is revolutionary: not only as a legal actor, but as ontologically endowed with dignity and values whose rights are a legal and political expression. What is meant by "human being"? And what is the human being subject to law? What makes it possible to attribute the rights to an individual? Why, precisely in modernity, do you feel the need to organize rights legally and to formulate human rights, while maintaining that they are the prerequisite for being part of civil society? Through a brief reconstruction of some salient moments in the history of law up to modernity, I will propose some reflections on the underlying conception of human beings. This conception remains problematic, however, it is important to ask the question about the sense of "human being" and the fact that this question remains "open" both in the formulation of the idea of law and in the values on which we believe it is based. The idea is that the revolution brought about by modern law is so well beyond its logical and legal forms-which however remain essential-and is of consequence not only to a new vision of the world order but also of human beings.
The Right to have Rights as a Response to the Decline Of Human Dignity and the Nation-State
The following essay explores Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism by emphasizing how her controversial idea of the right to have rights deals with one of the elements that contributed to the rise of totalitarianism, i.e., the decline of the nation-state. I am dividing this essay into three parts for the sake of argumentative clarity and organizational purposes. Part one analyzes the decadence of the nation-state and its connection to the rise of totalitarianism from an Arendtian perspective by highlighting the relation between this political deterioration and the decay of traditional notions of human dignity. Subsequently, part two focuses on the question of the right to have rights as a response to this dual and related decadence of the nation-state and human dignity while exploring Stephanie DeGooyer's interpretative framework of the right to have rights as both an analytical tool and a lost right. Lastly, part three ends with an assessment of whether or not the right to have rights serve an operative function in the fight against totalitarian domination through engaging with Arendt's views on the practicality of this philosophical, political, and existential problem. Consequently, this written analysis is not a mere re-explanation of Arendt's positions but a critical and interpretative exploration of the textual material in question.
Taking the “Human” Out of Human Rights
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 2010
Human rights are universally acknowledged to be important, although they are, of course, by no means universally respected. This universality has helped to combat racism and sexism and other arbitrary and vicious forms of discrimination. Unfortunately, as we shall see, the universality of human rights is both too universal and not universal enough. It is time to take the “human” out of human rights. Indeed, it is very probable that in the future there will be no more humans as we know them now, because the further evolution of our species, either Darwinian or more likely determined by human choices, will, we must hope, result in the emergence of new sorts of beings better able to cope with the intellectual and physical challenges of the future. One example of the ways in which this is already happening is the sorts of cognitive enhancement that are already coming on stream. Another is signaled by stem cell research and the birth of regenerative medicine.
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.