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Poverty, Agency, and Human Rights collects thirteen new philosophical papers that focus on the diverse ways poverty impacts the agency of the poor, the reasons why poverty alleviation schemes should also promote the agency of beneficiaries, and the fitness of the human rights regime to secure both economic development and free agency.

The extent, variety, and intractability of misogynist gender systems and the intersections between gender inequity and other forms of injustice expose tensions between the value of individuality and the disvalue of systematic social and economic subordination. The former presupposes a type of freedom that the latter aims to suppress. These essays develop an action theory that takes this contradiction into account-an action theory for feminists and other social dissidents

"In this innovative, elegantly written investigation, Diana Meyers invites her readers to reflect on, and devise ways of resisting, the ubiquitous yet varied imagery of 'woman' that saturates the social-political western world, thwarting women's efforts to achieve autonomous self-hood. Ranging widely across pronatalist messages, psychiatric practice, the health-beauty industry, and subtly conveyed inducements to remake the female body, she shows how women ingest normalizing images that they must struggle to expel if they are to affirm an authentic sense of self. This is a hopeful book, for Meyers is convinced that feminist women can indeed liberate themselves from the pressures such imagery exerts."--Lorraine Code, Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy, York University.

This essay explores four aspects of Gruen's theory. The first section considers her analysis of the concepts of sympathy, pity, and emotional contagion. The second section outlines the main features of her conception of empathy and highlights some worries about empathy that her theory addresses. The third section examines empathy's contributions to moral epistemology. The fourth section queries Gruen's contention that empathy is morally motivating.

It is often said that human rights are the rights that people possess simply in virtue of being human – that is, in virtue of their intrinsic, dignity-defining common humanity. Yet, on closer inspection the human rights landscape doesn't look so even. Once we bring perpetrators of human rights abuse and their victims into the picture, attributions of humanity to persons become unstable. In this article, I trace the ways in which rights discourse ascribes variable humanity to certain categories of people. I set the stage for my discussion of the human in relation to human rights by examining John Locke's account of the justification for punishment. For Locke, in committing a crime one abrogates one's humanity and forfeits one's rights. Likewise, I argue, human rights discourse takes a scalar view of humanity. I consider victims of genocide who are dehumanized as helpless and passive, victims of state persecution who are super-humanized as righteously agentic, and perpetrators of genocide who are dehumanized as out-of-control beasts. In each case I use relevant testimony to argue that the scalar view of humanity is factually incorrect and morally deplorable. For genocide victims, I discuss testimony that Selma Leydesdorff gathered from women who survived the Srebrenica massacre. For a victim of persecution, I discuss Liao Yiwu's memoire of his detention and imprisonment in China because of his artwork protesting the Tiananmen Square massacre. For perpetrators of genocide, I discuss testimony Jean Hatzfeld gathered from Hutu men who systematically murdered Tutsis in the Rwandan genocide. Finally, I apply my critique of dehumanized and super-humanized victims and dehumanized perpetrators to the problem of transnational trafficking in persons and argue that the view I advocate necessitates reforming immigration policy with respect to persons trafficked into forced labor.