Online research in philosophy

The consequentialist project for human rights -- Exceptions to libertarian natural rights -- The main principle -- What is well-being? What is equity? -- The two deepest mysteries in moral philosophy -- Security rights -- Epistemological foundations for the priority of autonomy rights -- The millian epistemological argument for autonomy rights -- Property rights, contract rights, and other economic rights -- Democratic rights -- Equity rights -- The most reliable judgment standard for weak paternalism -- Liberty rights and privacy rights -- Clarifications and responses to objections -- Conclusion.

In an article entitled, “Imagining Human Rights” Professor Ian Ward considers the fate of human rights at the beginning of the twenty-first century. While, as he argues, human rights have been seen as an epitome of liberalism’s triumph, this perception has come to be regarded as a delusion amid the acts of genocide and inhumanity that have characterized the past decade. Ward argues for a re-evaluation of the idea of human rights through an accommodation of “sense and sensibility” that allows for a vision of a pluralistic conception of human rights. This paper seeks to refute this view. In this respect, it examines Kant’s views on human freedom as well as the relevance of Dworkin’s notion of “integrity” in terms of achieving a workable framework for the achievement of human rights despite diverse and competing notions of justice.

The general practice of tracing the concept of human rights back to its presumed philosophical origins in the concepts of natural law and/or natural right, and invoking those concepts to give the idea of human rights its moral direction and philosophical substance, is dramatically mistaken. Interpreting human rights as the philosophical progeny of these earlier traditions allows the uglier aspects of natural rights and natural law, which the concept of human rights was intended to remedy, to serve as the defining characteristics of human rights.

The PRC has often criticized Western human rights policies based in part on the claim that liberal democracy and human rights are nothing more than the culturally contingent by-product of Enlightenment Europe incompatible with China's cultural and political traditions and out of step with contemporary circumstances in the PRC. Recently, Richard Rorty has offered a pragmatic alternative to liberal democracy and human rights founded on the universal claims and metaphysical assumptions of the Enlightenment. At the same time, Rorty remains unabashedly ethnocentric, asserting the superiority of ironic liberalism and "our" culture of rights. Whether his liberalism and rights culture stripped of its foundational and universal baggage will prove any more congenial to the development of liberal democracy and individual rights in China than its Enlightenment parent is examined here.