Rights as Common Concerns

Ratio Juris, 2010

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. Not the least of our difficulties when we think about rights is that, despite their ubiquity in our discourse, it is unclear just what a right is. (Weinreb 1992, 281) * I would like to thank Ana Vrdoljak, Gianluigi Palombella, and Nicholas White for helpful criticisms and comments. 1 As has become clear to me from our conversations, Palombella 2000 argues for an account of fundamental rights that is very similar to my account of human rights.

The historical progression of the idea of 'Rights' and 'Citizenship' are embedded in a narrative, which postures itself as a Universalist in nature. The role of 'State' in such a narrative account cannot be over-stressed. The concept of 'Rights' in such a context comes across as an act of dispensation. Dispensation of 'Justice', such an account and its discussion problematises the almost universally accepted notions regarding 'Human Rights'. In order to do so, some of the major epistemological shifts are identified to analyze the 'accepted' continuum of human thought and behaviour which are universal in nature. It would be useful here to question the 'universal' tenor of this kind of exercise in modern social science theories where nature has been 'pushed' in to the periphery. The MDG envisioned, must overcome this academic and practical resistance to identify the crux of international relation.

Sabodhini , 2020

In political discourses, continuous discussions on rights has created a regime of rights. It is known that in the contemporary political systems rights are argued and ensured as possessions that are exercised and enjoyed by individuals, for personal and common good. Since rights as goodness are evolved in different school of thoughts and are argued in multiple contexts, it is increasingly important to investigate the meanings of "Right (s)" advanced by different scholars. An investigation like such is essential for modern democracy because it focuses on some important questions which seeks to explore that what can be considered as a basic right and what justifies a right as basic. Present paper, in this view is an attempt to explore that how the idea of rights is defined by different scholars and how the idea of basic rights is been argued. To present the discussion as a part of political philosophy the author has used hermeneutic approach as a research tool. Theoretical Backdrop Modern democratic states have an obligation to fulfill the purpose of rights i.e. to attain the common "good" with common consensus. A philosophical and constitutional consensus, on the significance of rights as inalienable condition is commonly noted in constitutional democracies. It is noted that democratically matured states (relatively committed democracies) are sincerely agreed on a fact that for the dignified life of human beings, rights are essential conditions and are required to be standardized, legally. However, for the new democracies, standardization of essentials as right through a legal framework is a challenging task. Maximum states in the process of democratization have realized that assuring all essentials as rights is impractical and a utopian promise. This is because the resources are limited and often controlled by the nature. For the democracies that are not rich by the natural and human recourses, identification of most essentials with the limitation has democratic significance. An administrative fact is that the understanding and acceptance of natural limitations, may help these states to manage the most basic needs as rights. This can further ignore the burden of excessive demands and can assure required sustainability in governance. The realized need pinpoints that identifying and exploring the idea of rights is not simply a philosophical exercise. However, the same is more important to address the problems concerning to the democratic governance, which urges for equality, freedom and justice. The significance of attaining the conceptual and contextual clarity on the idea of right seeks to explore the meaning of rights that can be understood and argued by commons.

Current Legal Problems, 2012

Two important trends are discernible in the contemporary philosophy of human rights. According to foundationalism, human rights have importantly distinctive normative grounds as compared with other moral norms. An extreme version of foundationalism claims that human interests do not figure among the grounds of human rights; a more moderate version restricts the human interests that can ground human rights to a subset of that general class, eg basic needs or our interest in freedom. According to functionalism, it belongs to the essence of human rights that they play a certain political role or combination of such roles, eg operating as benchmarks for the legitimacy of states or triggers for intervention against states that violate them. This article presents a view of human rights that opposes both the foundationalist and the functionalist trends. Against foundationalism, it is argued that a plurality of normative values ground human rights; these values include not only the equal moral status of all human beings but also potentially all universal human interests. Against functionalism, it is argued that human rights are moral standards-moral rights possessed by all human beings simply in virtue of their humanity-that may perform a plurality of political functions, but that none of these functions is definitive of their nature as human rights. The ensuing, doubly pluralistic, account of human rights is one that, it is claimed, both makes best sense of the contemporary human rights culture and reveals the strong continuities between that culture and the natural rights tradition.

1988

A glance at history shows that the progressive development of human rights has been considerably conditioned by the evolution of social relations, and the forms in which these relations were institutionalized. It was not in abstract that newly recognised human rights came to be defined, but in the context of the modern state and that of an industrial and technological civilization; in the context of the bitter experience of two World Wars and the social and political evolution after 1945. This evolution has been characterized by a process of decolonialisation, by a growing sense of solidarity among mankind, and by a widespread awareness of the delicate ecological balance of our one and only Earth which is limited in its natural resources. The remarkable thing about the evolution of human rights is that it appears to have followed in a given direction. In fact, we notice the widening of the concept of human rights which had originated in the eighteenth century. Throughout the whole d...

Contemporary Political Theory, 2021

Since the eighteenth century, political revolutions in the West have claimed to have supplanted traditional modes of domination with a new political thinking premised on the notion that 'all men are created equal'. It is tempting to think that our current era of global politics, dominated by authoritarian abuses of power under the guise of 'law and order', is a radical departure from the ideals of individual freedom and equality that we uphold as the ethos of modern liberalism. In Critique of Rights, Christoph Menke suggests instead that the juridicalization of these ideals in the modern form of rights reifies these very modes of domination. By laying bare the contradiction immanent in our bourgeois-revolutionary notions of freedom and autonomy, Menke demonstrates that the form of rights upon which modern law is predicated has itself disempowered the political community by elevating, legitimizing, and naturalizing the desire of the individual over and above the social. Describing his work as a 'genealogy of bourgeois rights', Menke reveals how the modern form of rights has engendered a 'fundamental upheaval in the ontology of law' that has redefined normativity itself (pp. 4-5). By tracing the development of law across three historical legal systems -Aristotle's Athens, Cicero's Rome, and Ockham's London -Menke demonstrates how the emergence and reification of an individual, claims-based notion of rights took the place of classical, normative conceptualizations of justice: justice is no longer fair distribution or right reason, but the ability to will at one's discretion, negative liberty made manifest. This bourgeois form of rights has reduced law to an assessment of rights claims and transformed the 'ontology of normativity' into the juridicalization of the natural. Justice, in turn, has become the protection and validation of individual autonomy over and against the autonomy of others. The first half of Menke's four-part book traces the 'legalization of the natural' that has culminated in the modern form of rights. Menke's work differs from other critical analyses of law by taking as his focus not the subject, but the structure of rights that comprises modern law: By demonstrating how the transition from a normative and natural understanding of law to a formal and nominal understanding of right has engendered a more fundamental separation of law and morality, Menke

The Josias, 2022

Do rights exist, or are they moral fictions? What is the significance of the distinction between objective and subjective rights? This paper gives an account of rights and their relation to the common good.

Manchester University Press eBooks, 2010

The construction of human rights: dominant approaches 19 T he idea of human rights covers a complex and fragmentary terrain. As R. J. Vincent comments near the beginning of his work on human rights in international relations, 'human rights' is a readily used term that has become a 'staple of world politics', the meaning of which is by no means self-evident (1986: 7). After glossing the term as the 'idea that humans have rights' (1986: 7)-a deceptively simple approach-Vincent notes that this is a profoundly contested territory, philosophically as well as politically. This is not surprising, as notions of human rights draw indirectly or directly on some of our most deeply embedded presumptions and reference-points-for those of us in liberal democracies, particularly those cosmologies concerning the nature of the person and of political community. Questions about and concepts of the human as individual, of what is right, the state, justice, freedom, equality, and so on, flicker like a constellation of stars just off the edge of our fields of analysis-fading in and out, holding much, promising or claimed as anchorage, yet elusive and obscure. For many, the assertion of human rights has become a kind of repository of secular virtue-a declaration of the sacred in the absence of the divine. In the Western liberal democracies, human rights are claimed as political home or as a principal 'instrument of struggle' by the libertarian right, by liberals of various persuasions, by socialists who feel the traditional socialist agenda has been overtaken by events and by 'post-liberal democrats'. To declare in a debate that the matter at hand involves rights can be to 'trump' discussion, drawing the limits beyond which exchange may not go, in a way that Ronald Dworkin (1977, 1984) probably did not intend. The language of rights thus carries great power while being potentially deeply divided against itself. The purpose of this chapter is to draw attention to some of the orders of thought that dominate human rights promotion and shape the meaning of this powerful, complex and in some ways contradictory tool of rights and 'rights talk'. In particular, I want to underline the limitations of these orders of thought, the narrowness of some of their central categories and the disfiguring M. Anne Brown-9781526121110

For many thinkers, the historic philosophical analysis of the birth and growth of human rights has identified the West with the interest and support for individual rights and the rest of the world with the primacy of collective rights. This paper is meant to form the counterargument of this view, showing that those collective rights are not alien to the Western cultures. Final aim of this paper is to underline that if collective rights are not foreign to Western cultures, the whole human rights discourse -and the idea of human rights being acceptable everywhere- should be reconsidered, and specifically, beyond the dualism of individual versus collective rights.