Online research in philosophy

It is our job now - the job of this book - to influence and develop the unsettled discourse of human rights so as to complete the incomplete idea.

Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims across the world. Human Rights and Narrated Lives explores what happens when autobiographical narratives are produced, received, and circulated in the field of human rights. It asks how personal narratives emerge in local settings how international rights discourse enables and constrains individual and collective subjectivities in narration how personal narratives circulate and take on new meanings in new contexts and how and under what conditions they feed into, affect, and are affected by the reorganization of politics in post-cold war, postcolonial, globalizing human rights contexts.

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.

Contemporary discourse on human rights in Africa constitutes an important and controversial aspect of the general discourse on African society and culture. I begin by examining the idea of human rights as a moral category and discuss its pertinence to African cultural and political life. I then analyze and discuss the two dominant positions in the current debate, namely, the communitarian and the individualist theses. I argue that both positions are inadequate because they dissociate dimensions of life that need to be interpreted in their interplay. Drawing upon samples of traditional African religious and ethical traditions, I propose a personalist theory of human rights that affirms the intrinsic individuality and sociality of the human status.

In this essay, I apply international human rights theory to the domestic discussion of criminalization. The essay takes as its starting point the “right not to be punished” that Douglas Husak posited in his recent book Overcriminalization . By reviewing international human rights norms, I take up Husak’s challenge to imbue this right with further normative content. This process reveals additional relationships between the criminal law and human rights theory, and I discuss one analogy: the derogation by states of an individual’s human rights under specified conditions has certain similarities to the punishment by states of an individual who holds a right not to be punished. Along the way, I highlight the normative implications of defining a human right not to be punished under both generalist and specificationist perspectives on moral rights. Noting the similarities as well as the differences in the concepts of punishment and derogation, this essay aims to contribute to the exchange between theories of human rights and the criminal law.

In light of such basic Buddhist teachings as karma and interdependence, the conceptions of "rights" and "human being" presupposed by the dominant currents in contemporary human rights discourse are critically evaluated here. The negative recusiveness of such a discourse and its promotion of minimum standards for secure coexistence is examined, and a Buddhist perspective on human rights forwarded in which realizing our dramatic interdependence and social virtuosity are held paramount.

The Challenge of Human Rights traces the history of human rights theory from classical antiquity through the enlightenment to the modern human rights movement, and analyses the significance of human rights in today’s increasingly globalized world. Provides an engaging study of the origin and the philosophical and political development of human rights discourse. Offers an original defence of human rights. Explores the significance of human rights in the context of increasing globalisation. Confronts the major objections to human rights, including the charge of western ethical imperialism and cultural relativism. Argues that human rights logically culminate in an ethical cosmopolitanism to reflect the moral unity of the human race.

The human rights discourse is vitiated by its tendency to reification, a tendency manifest in an ideologically motivated failure to take the reasons for human rights seriously. When a set of rights fall short, in range or strength, of the reasons adduced for them, any claim to the universality and priority of the rights in question is open to the charge of falsification and reification. Such a claim invites immanent critique insofar as a human rights discourse fails to take its own reasons seriously by working out a set of rights commensurate with them. Further critique is necessary if the human rights concept as such can be shown to be incapable of living up to the best reasons for human rights, in the shape, the author argues, of agency-based reasons. These kinds of critique, especially the latter, can serve as an antidote to the reifying tendency of the human rights discourse.

Akhil Reed Amar, The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997, xi + 272 pp.