Tilburg School of Humanities

Abstract

This is a paper about ‘human rights pluralism’, and about how human rights’ inherent flexibility can be embraced by development policy-makers and practitioners in ways that can aid the goals of both development and human rights. The paper argues that, even though human rights are often expressed in legal terms – terms that are usually associated with the rigidity of obligation – human rights are inherently pluralistic. This is for two reasons. First, upon closer inspection, human rights laws, and especially international human rights laws, far from imposing rigidity, reflect substantial elasticity as regards their statement, interpretation and implementation. And second, in any case, it is and always has been a mistake not to consider human rights laws within the unavoidably influential philosophical, cultural and economic contexts in which they operate. The political, in other words, is both a necessary and desirable dimension of the legal expression of human rights. Drawing upon this conceptual basis, the paper identifies six specific ‘grammatical features’ of human rights and describes how and why they might be profitably employed by development specialists

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

  • Only published works are available at libraries.

Similar books and articles

Human Rights.João Cardoso Rosas - 2008 - Proceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 11:93-100.
Religion, Religions, and Human Rights.Louis Henkin - 1998 - Journal of Religious Ethics 26 (2):229-239.
Human rights and human well-being.William Talbott - 2010 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The Global Reach of Human Rights.Amartya Sen - 2012 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 29 (2):91-100.
Human Rights and Human Security.Jurate Morkuniene - 2008 - Proceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 11:77-83.

Analytics

Added to PP
2011-05-17

Downloads
9 (#1,075,425)

6 months
0

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references