In his recent work, Jürgen Habermas signals the abandonment of his earlier claims to justify human rights and universalist morality. This paper explains the above shift, arguing that it is the inescapable result of his attempts in recent years to accommodate pluralism. The paper demonstrates how Habermas’s universal pragmatic justification of modern normative standards was inextricably tied to his consensus theory of validity. He was compelled by the structure of that argument to count on the current or future availability of (...) a unified framework within which all can potentially articulate their needs and interests. With his abandonment of the justification Habermas has rid discourse theory of this controversial assumption. In weakening its defense of human rights and universalist morality against the charge of ethnocentrism, he has strengthened his theory’s foothold in the lived pluralist world. Key Words: argumentation • ethnocentrism • Habermas • human rights • justification • legitimacy • pluralism • rational consensus • Rehg. (shrink)

The essay begins from Alan Gewirth's influential account of human rights, and specifically with his argument that the human right to political participation can only be fulfilled by competitive, liberal democracy. I show that his argument rests on empirical, rather than conceptual grounds, which opens the possibility that in China, alternative forms of participation may be legitimate or even superior. An examination of the theory and contemporary practice of 'democratic centralism' shows that while it does not now adequately support the (...) right to political participation, a reformed version could. I focus in particular on the roles that could be played by consultative institutions, looking both to recent Chinese proposals and to analogues currently existing in Japan. I conclude that a reformed democratic centralism may well be the objective toward which Chinese people should strive. (shrink)

Extant business research has not addressed the ethical treatment of individuals with psychiatric disabilities. This article will describe previous research on individuals with psychiatric disabilities drawn from rehabilitation, psychological, managerial, legal, as well as related business ethics writings before presenting a framework that illustrates the dynamics of (un)ethical behavior in relation to the employment of such individuals. Individuals with psychiatric disabilities often evoke negative reactions from those in their environment. Lastly, we provide recommendations for how employees and organizations can become (...) more proactive in providing individuals with such disabilities equal employment opportunities for both access and accommodation in the workplace. (shrink)

Abstract. A special legal status is accorded to human rights within Western liberal democracies: They enjoy a priority over other human goods and are not subjected to the majoritarian principle. The underlying assumption—the idea that there are some human values that deserve special protection—implies the need for both a normative and a conceptual justification. This paper claims that neither can be provided. The normative justification is needed to support the priority of human rights over other human goods and to rank and (...) balance conflicting human rights, but it can't be provided because of the fact of pervasive value pluralism, the fact that human values are many, incompatible and incommensurable. The conceptual justification is needed to avoid arbitrariness in the interpretation of human rights at the adjudication stage. Such a justification is impossible, however, as the concept of human rights, and the concepts used to justify them and to solve their conflicts are "essentially contested concepts." The paper concludes that, provided that the interpretation of human rights presupposes value judgements and political choices, the special legal status accorded to human rights is not justified. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

With the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the idea of human rights came into its own on the world stage. More than anything, the Declaration was a response to the Holocaust, to both its perpetrators and the failure of the rest of the world adequately to come to the aid of its victims. Since that year, however, we have seen many more cases of mass murder. Think of China, Bali, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and now (...) Darfur. Of course one could always claim that such horrors would have been even more frequent if not for the Declaration. But I want to argue otherwise. For I believe that human rights have contributed to making mass murder more, rather than less, likely. To be clear, my concern is specifically with the language of human rights, not the values it expresses, values which I certainly endorse. The problem with this language is that it is abstract. And the problem with abstraction is that it demotivates, it 'unplugs' us from the 'moral sources,' as Charles Taylor would call them, which empower us to act ethically. After showing why, I then go on to describe how the rise of human rights has constituted an ironic tragedy of sorts for those philosophers who have attempted to lend it intellectual support. On the whole, they may be divided into two groups. One, led by cosmopolitans such as Martha Nussbaum and Thomas Pogge, tries to interlock rights within systematic theories of justice, thus fixing the priorities between them. The other, led by value pluralists such as Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams, rejects such theories as infeasible and asserts that the best we can do when rights conflict is to negotiate. Yet both approaches, I argue, are counter-productive. (shrink)

International business faces a host of difficult moral conflicts. It is tempting to think that these conflicts can be morally resolved if we gained full knowledge of the situations, were rational enough, and were sufficiently objective. This paper explores the view that there are situations in which people in business must confront the possibility that they must compromise some of their important principles or values in order to protect other ones. One particularly interesting case that captures this kind of situation (...) is that of Google and its operations in China. In this paper, I examine the situation Google faces as part of the larger issue of moral compromise and integrity in business. Though I look at Google, this paper is just as much about the underlying or background views Google faces that are at work in business ethics. In the process, I argue the following: First, the framework Google has used to respond to criticisms of its actions does not successfully or obviously address the important ethical issues it faces. Second, an alternative ethical account can be presented that better addresses these ethical and human rights questions. However, this different framework brings the issue of moral compromise to the fore. This is an approach filled with dangers, particularly since it is widely held that one ought never to compromise one’s moral principles. Nevertheless, I wish to propose that there may be a place for moral compromise in business under certain conditions, which I attempt to specify. (shrink)

In a recent important book,The Ethics of International Business, Tom Donaldson argues that multinational corporations (as well as individuals and nationstates) must, at a minimum, respect international human rights. For a purported right to be such a fundamental right it must satisfy three conditions. Donaldson calls the third condition the fairness-affordability condition. The affordability part of this condition holds that moral agents must be capable of paying for the burdens and responsibilities that a proposed human right would impose. If this (...) is impossible, then the purported right is not an international human right.I argue that Donaldson''s affordability condition is subject to four objections which reveal its untenability as one of the conditions upon which identification of international human rights must rest. I offer another way of treating problems of affordability and capability when it comes to such rights that all moral agents must respect. (shrink)

There is a puzzling disconnect between recent philosophical literature on equality and the modern theory and practice of human rights. This disconnect is puzzling because the modern human rights movement is arguably the most salient and powerful manifestation of the commitment to equality in our time. One likely source of this disconnect is the tendency of contributors to the philosophical literature on equality to focus on justice within the state, considered in isolation. This article begins the task of connection. Section (...) II outlines a philosophical conception of human rights, the Modest Objectivist View, according to which the list of human rights is grounded in descriptive and normative egalitarian assumptions about what is required to help ensure that every individual has the opportunity for a minimally good or decent human life. Next, I explore the resources of the Modest Objectivist View for rationally reconstructing the conventional conception of human rights. Section III examines challenges to the Modest Objectivist View’s egalitarian assumptions. Section IV explores the question of whether the minimal egalitarianism of the Modest Objectivist View is compatible with the more robust egalitarianisms advanced in recent philosophical literature. I conclude that the minimalist egalitarianism of human rights is compatible with more robust egalitarian principles, once we understand the distinctive function of human rights as standards of transnational justice. Key Words: basic interests • decent human life • egalitarianism • equality • minimally good life • Modest Objectivist View • minimalism • opportunity for a decent life • transnational justice. (shrink)

Globalization, a process characterized by the growing interdependence of the world's people, impacts health systems and the social determinants of health in ways that are detrimental to health equity. In a world in which there are few countervailing normative and policy approaches to the dominant neoliberal regime underpinning globalization, the human rights paradigm constitutes a widely shared foundation for challenging globalization's effects. The substantive rights enumerated in human rights instruments include the right to the highest attainable level of physical and (...) mental health and others that are relevant to the determinants of health. The rights stipulated in these documents impose extensive legal obligations on states that have ratified these documents and confer health entitlements on their residents. Human rights norms have also inspired civil society efforts to improve access to essential medicines and medical services, particularly for HIV/AIDS. Nevertheless, many factors reduce the potential counterweight human rights might exert, including and specifically the nature of the human rights approach, weak political commitments to promoting and protecting health rights on the part of some states and their lack of institutional and economic resources to do so. Global economic markets and the relative power of global economic institutions are also shrinking national policy space. This article reviews the potential contributions and limitations of human rights to achieving greater equity in shaping the social determinants of health. (shrink)

This paper argues that widely accepted understanding of the respective responsibilities of business and government in the post war industrialized world can be traced back to a tacit social contract that emerged following the second world war. The effect of this contract was to assign responsibility for generating wealth to business and responsibility for ensuring the equitable sharing of wealth to governments. Without question, this arrangement has resulted in substantial improvements in the quality of life in the industrialized world in (...) the intervening period. I argue that with advance of economic globalization and the growing power and influence of multi national corporations, this division of responsibilities is not longer viable or defensible. What is needed, fifty years after the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, is a new social contract that shares responsibilities for human rights and related ethical responsibilities in a manner more in keeping with the vision captured by the post war Declaration. I conclude by suggesting some reasons for thinking that a new social contract may be emerging. (shrink)

This study assesses the dimensionality and correlates of individuals' attitudes toward human rights. In previous research, the Attitudes Toward Human Rights Inventory (ATHRI) was assumed to measure a unidimensional phenomenon and, as such, was used as an omnibus measure of human rights attitudes. In this study, factor analysis revealed the presence of 3 factors accounting for the variance in the measure, Personal Liberties, Civilian Constraint, and Social Security. This finding provided partial replication of results obtained by Diaz-Veizades, Widaman, Little, and (...) Gibbs (1995) with their Human Rights Questionnaire and supports the contention that human rights attitudes should be considered multidimensional in nature. Correlation and regression analyses suggested that attitudes toward personal liberties are associated with political identification, whereas attitudes toward civilian constraint are related to moral judgment development and need for cognitive closure. Implications for ethics research and education are discussed. (shrink)

David Hollenbach, working within the context of human rights theory, has developed the notion of "indigenous pluralism" as a means of coping with the problems that arise when different religious traditions hold distinct or incompatible interpretations of human rights. It will be argued that indigenous pluralism is a theoretically and practically useful concept for bioethics as well and hence should be incorporated into bioethical methodology and processes of bioethical policy formation. Subsequently, the notion of indigenous pluralism will be discussed in (...) relation to determinations of death as a means of illustrating this concept's applicability to bioethical inquiry. (shrink)

In a recent spate of reflective writings on the concept of human rights, philosophers have been concerned to firm up the analytical boundaries of human rights discourse, without excluding welfare rights from the catalogue. The article considers three of these recent attempts to `revalue the currency' of human rights: the agency conception, the pluralist conception, and the negative duties conception. It ultimately defends a `dignity-based' account of human rights, in which any number of human interests and values may ground a (...) right, but in which the failure to respect the right must constitute a threat to human dignity (one's sense of self-worth as a person) in order for it to count as a genuine human right. It further argues that a `dignity-based' account of human rights justifies a focus on the state as the agent against which human rights are held, and gives us reason to doubt that the state could adequately fulfil the human-rights-based duties it owes its citizens by simple forbearance. On the account offered here, the state may be said to violate the rights of its members, and to threaten their human dignity, when it fails to provide them with the means to realize their basic needs. Key Words: human dignity • civil and political rights • welfare rights • social rights. (shrink)

Within liberal democratic theory, ‘democratic accountability’ denotes an aggregative method for linking political decisions to citizens’ preferences through representative institutions. Could such a notion be transferred to the global context of human rights? Various obstacles seem to block such a transfer: there are no ‘world citizens’ as such; many people in need of human rights are not citizens of constitutional democratic states; and the aggregative methods that are supposed to sustain the link are often used in favour of nation-state strategic (...) action rather than human rights. So what could accountability mean in relation to human rights? This article argues that discourse theory offers resources for approaching these problems and for rethinking a normative notion of accountability in relation to human rights. It is suggested that accountability should link political decisions to universal agreements through global rights institutions and that the link should be sustained by deliberative rather than aggregative procedures. (shrink)

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. (shrink)