Rousseau's Du contrat social develops an important, unjustly neglected type of theory, which I call 'Natural Law Constructivism' ('NLC'), which identifies and justifies strictly objective basic moral principles, with no appeal to moral realism or its alternatives, nor to elective agreement, nor to prudentialist reasoning. The Euthyphro Question marks a dilemma in moral theory which highlights relations between artifice and arbitrariness. These relations highlight the significance of Hume's founding insight into NLC, and how NLC addresses Hobbes's insight that our most (...) fundamental moral problems concern social coordination. Part 2 systematically re-examines the core of Rousseau's theory of justice to show that it assigns no constitutive role to contractual agreement in identifying or justifying basic normative principles. Part 3 highlights his NLC. (shrink)

‘Universalist’ moral principles have fallen into disfavour because too often they have been pretexts for unilateral impositions upon others, whether domestically or internationally. Too widely neglected has been Kant’s specifically Critical re-analysis of the scope and character of rational justification in all non-formal domains, including the entirety of epistemology and moral philosophy, including both justice and ethics. Rational judgment is inherently normative because it is in part constituted by our self-assessment of whether the considerations we now integrate into a candidate (...) judgment have been integrated as they ought, so as to form a cogent, justifiable judgment. Constitutive of this self-assessment is that rational judgments must be based upon considerations which can be communicated to all others, such that they too can assess them as sufficiently cogent justification; also constitutive of this rational self-assessment is that we actually engage with others who do assess our judgments. Kant’s Critical principles rule out in principle any unilateral imposition upon others, whether in cognition or morals. Using Kant’s Critical principles and methods in connection with ‘practical anthropology’ and the enormously important domain of acquired rights and obligations shows how Kant had already justified fundamentally universal principles of justice which can be institutionalised in variously distinctive cultures, and which form the proper bases for our acquired, specifically social rights and obligations, including those of friendship and community. (shrink)

Moral particularism is often conceived as the view that there are no moral principles. However, its most fêted accounts focus almost exclusively on rules regarding actions and their features. Such action-centred particularism is, I argue, compatible with generalism at the level of character traits. The resulting view is a form of particularist virtue ethics. This endorses directives of the form ‘Be X’ but rejects any implication that the relevant X-ness must therefore always count in favour of an action.

This thesis seeks to engage with and give answers to the fundamental question of rights interpretation confronting the British judiciary under the Human Rights Act 1998. As a premise, it recognises that the textual openness and consequential semantic uncertainty of the requirements of the Convention rights necessitates their interpretation. In determining the approach the courts should apply, this thesis takes as its structural foundation an analysis of the current approach of the domestic courts and the European Court of Human Rights (...) to the five pivotal questions of interpretation: who has rights, the substantive nature of those rights, how rights are to be weighted and balanced in cases of conflict, whether they are rights under a will or an interest conception, and against whom the rights are held? From this basis, the thesis builds upon the existing knowledge to apply Alan Gewirth’s Principle of Generic Consistency to the current judicial position, to critique its compatibility with this principle’s requirements. Through analysis of core settled characteristics of the Convention rights, the substance of the courts’ judgements and the ECtHR’s jurisprudence, and supported by both dialectically necessary and contingent arguments, it is ultimately argued that it is, theoretically and practically, both necessary and possible for the domestic courts to be guided by the PGC in their interpretive approach. Finally, an improved understanding of the principle of human dignity will be advocated as a means through which the domestic courts can apply the PGC’s requirements. By this means, this thesis ultimately proposes an interpretive approach to the Convention rights which gives compelling guidance in answering the fundamental questions of rights interpretation and, by encouraging direct principled engagement with these questions, increases the public understanding of the fundamental nature of rights and the acceptability of the HRA and judgements under it. (shrink)