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"An expanded and updated edition of a classic work on human rights and global justice. Since its original publication, Basic Rights has proven increasingly influential to those working in political philosophy, human rights, global justice, and the ethics of international relations and foreign policy, particularly in debates regarding foreign policy's role in alleviating global poverty. Henry Shue asks: Which human rights ought to be the first honored and the last sacrificed? Shue argues that subsistence rights, along with security rights and liberty rights, serve as the ground of all other human rights. This classic work, now available in a thoroughly updated fortieth-anniversary edition, includes a substantial new chapter by the author examining how the accelerating transformation of our climate progressively undermines the bases of subsistence like sufficient water, affordable food, and housing safe from forest-fires and sea-level rise. Climate change threatens basic rights"--

Public pronouncements on human rights by American officials and by nongovernmental rights advocates often include references to dignity. Yet the term does not appear in the fundamental texts that shaped the American commitment to rights—the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the post-Civil War amendments to the United States Constitution. Many of those using the word may not recognize that Europeans (and others, too) who speak of dignity often mean something that does not accord with the central value given to liberty in the traditional American approach to rights. Though liberty and dignity can be complementary values, there are circumstances in which they can come into conflict. Yet references to dignity have become prominent in American discussions of rights, perhaps because the term is used so frequently in other parts of the world. Another factor may be recognition that, in some important areas, commitment to the concept of dignity, as it is understood in Europe, provides greater protection for rights than is available in the United States.

Public pronouncements on human rights by American officials and by nongovernmental rights advocates often include references to dignity. Yet the term does not appear in the fundamental texts that shaped the American commitment to rights -- the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the post-Civil War amendments to the United States Constitution. Many of those using the word may not recognize that Europeans (and others, too) who speak of dignity often mean something that does not accord with the central value given to liberty in the traditional American approach to rights. Though liberty and dignity can be complementary values, there are circumstances in which they can come into conflict. Yet references to dignity have become prominent in American discussions of rights, perhaps because the term is used so frequently in other parts of the world. Another factor may be recognition that, in some important areas, commitment to the concept of dignity, as it is understood in Europe, provides greater protection for rights than is available in the United States. The clearest and most forceful European assertion of the central place of dignity is to be found in the German Grundgesetz (Basic Law) of 1949, in effect, the country's Constitution. Article I begins, "Human dignity is inviolable. To respect it and protect it is the duty of all state power. The German people therefore acknowledge inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every community, of peace and of justice in the world." The Charter on Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which went into effect in December 2009 with the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty, essentially repeats this language in Article I: "Human dignity is inviolable. It must be respected and protected." As Michael Rosen points out in his recent book, Dignity: Its History and Meaning, the commitment to dignity has had immense importance in constitutional jurisprudence in Germany. Shortly before its incorporation in the Grundgesetz, dignity was given a similar place in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948, without dissent, but with abstentions by the Soviet Union and its satellites, as well as by both South Africa and Saudi Arabia. Historically, the concept of dignity is particularly associated with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and his categorical imperative: each person is to be treated as an end in himself or herself. Though contemporary constitutional thinking about dignity may be largely derived from Kant, it seems evident that dignity achieved its prominent place in post-war texts about rights in part as a response to the crimes of the Second World War. Adapted from the source document.

Hatemongering broadcasters have degraded political culture in the US, says Aryeh Neier. But protection for free speech remains the best antidote