Flawed attacks on contemporary human rights: Laudan, Sunstein, and the cost-benefit state [Book Review]

Human Rights Review 7 (1):92-110 (2005)
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Abstract

After giving a brief account of human rights, the paper investigates five contemporary attacks on them. All of the attacks come from two contemporary proponents of the cost-benefit state, attorney Cass Sunstein and philosopher Larry Laudan. These attacks may be called, respectively, the rationality, objectivity, permission, voluntariness, and comparativism claims. Laudan's and Sunstein's rationality claim (RC) ist that only policy decisions passing cost-benefit tests are rational. Their objectivity presupposition (OP) is that only acute, deterministic threats to life are objective. Sunstein’s permission claim (PC) is that regulators are merely permitted, 3 not required, to take distributive and human rights concerns into account. Sunstein’s 3 voluntariness claim (VC) is that the consent of potential victims is not relevant to government regulations about risks and benefits. Laudan’s comparativism claim 3 (CC) is that there are no rules of thumb, no precomparative norms like human rights, for assessing theory choice in policy science. The paper analyzes each of these claims, shows how they undercut human rights, and argues that each of them errs

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Kristin Shrader-Frechette
University of Notre Dame

Citations of this work

Risk.Sven Ove Hansson - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Competence and Trust in Choice Architecture.Evan Selinger & Kyle Powys Whyte - 2010 - Knowledge, Technology & Policy 23 (3-4):461-482.
Competence and Trust in Choice Architecture.Evan Selinger & Kyle Powys Whyte - 2010 - Knowledge, Technology & Policy 23 (3):461-482.

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References found in this work

Groundwork for the metaphysics of morals.Immanuel Kant - 1785 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Thomas E. Hill & Arnulf Zweig.
The law of peoples.John Rawls - 1999 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Edited by John Rawls.
Taking rights seriously.Ronald Dworkin (ed.) - 1977 - London: Duckworth.
Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals.Immanuel Kant - 1785 - In Elizabeth Schmidt Radcliffe, Richard McCarty, Fritz Allhoff & Anand Vaidya (eds.), Late Modern Philosophy: Essential Readings with Commentary. Blackwell.

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