Suchergebnisse

Introduction -- The contemporary idea of human rights -- Human rights as rights -- Making sense of human rights -- Starting points for justifying rights -- A framework for justifying specific rights -- The list question -- Due process rights and terrorist emergencies -- Economic liberties as fundamental freedoms -- Social rights as human rights -- Minority rights -- Eight responses to the relativist -- The good sense in human rights -- Appendix 1: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- Appendix 2: The European Convention on Human Rights -- Appendix 3: The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights -- Appendix 4: The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights

The ubiquity of human rights raises questions for the philosopher. If we want to understand these rights, where do we look? As a set of moral norms, it is tempting to think they can be grasped strictly from the armchair, say, by appeal to moral intuition. But what, if anything, can that kind of inquiry tell us about the human rights of contemporary politics, law, and civil society - that is, human rights as we ordinarily know them? This volume brings together a distinguished, interdisciplinary group of scholars to address philosophical questions raised by the complex status of human rights as both moral rights, on the one hand, and legally, politically, and historically practised rights, on the other.

Do we have a human right to work? What is the content of the right? Does it impose a duty on governments to promote full employment? Does it entail an obligation to protect decent work? There is also a question about the right-holders. Do migrants have a right to work, for example? At the same time many people would rather not work. What kind of right is this, if many people do not want to have it? The chapters of this book address the uncertainty and controversy that surround the right to work both in theoretical scholarship and in policymaking.

ohn Rawls is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has permanently shaped the nature and terms of moral and political philosophy, deploying a robust and specialized vocabulary that reaches beyond philosophy to political science, economics, sociology, and law. This volume is a complete and accessible guide to Rawls' vocabulary, with over 200 alphabetical encyclopaedic entries written by the world's leading Rawls scholars. From 'basic structure' to 'burdened society', from 'Sidgwick' to 'strains of commitment', and from 'Nash point' to 'natural duties', the volume covers the entirety of Rawls' central ideas and terminology, with illuminating detail and careful cross-referencing. It will be an essential resource for students and scholars of Rawls, as well as for other readers in political philosophy, ethics, political science, sociology, international relations and law.

Like people born shortly after World War II, the international human rights movement recently had its sixty-fifth birthday. This could mean that retirement is at hand and that death will come in a few decades. After all, the formulations of human rights that activists, lawyers, and politicians use today mostly derive from the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the world in 1948 was very different from our world today: the cold war was about to break out, communism was a strong and optimistic political force in an expansionist phase, and Western Europe was still recovering from the war. The struggle against entrenched racism and sexism had only just begun, decolonization was in its early stages, and Asia was still poor (Japan was under military reconstruction, and Mao's heavy-handed revolution in China was still in the future). Labor unions were strong in the industrialized world, and the movement of women into work outside the home and farm was in its early stages. Farming was less technological and usually on a smaller scale, the environmental movement had not yet flowered, and human-caused climate change was present but unrecognized. Personal computers and social networking were decades away, and Earth's human population was well under three billion.

This reply discusses Pablo Gilabert's response to my article, "Rethinking Indivisibility." It welcomes his distinction between conceptual, normative, epistemic, and causal forms of support from one right to another. It denies, however, that "Rethinking Indivisibility" downplayed linkage arguments for human rights (although it did call for careful evaluation of such arguments), and rejects Gilabert's suggestion that we understand the indivisibility of two rights as two rights being highly useful to each other (interdependence) rather than as mutual indispensability. In the final section, I offer two new worries about the system-wide indivisibility of human rights.

This reply discusses Pablo Gilabert's response to my article, "Rethinking Indivisibility." It welcomes his distinction between conceptual, normative, epistemic, and causal forms of support from one right to another. It denies, however, that "Rethinking Indivisibility" downplayed linkage arguments for human rights (although it did call for careful evaluation of such arguments), and rejects Gilabert's suggestion that we understand the indivisibility of two rights as two rights being highly useful to each other (interdependence) rather than as mutual indispensability. In the final section, I offer two new worries about the system-wide indivisibility of human rights.

Indivisibility is the idea that no human right can be fully realized without fully realizing all other human rights. When indivisibility occurs it has the practical consequence that countries cannot pick and choose among rights. This article offers a framework for understanding supporting relations between rights and gives a number of arguments against strong claims of indivisibility. A central thesis is that the strength of supporting relations between rights varies with quality of implementation. Rights with low quality implementation provide little support to other rights. This is why early UN formulations of indivisibility said that it occurs when the rights in question are fully realized. Even if strong claims about the indivisibility were true under high quality implementation, they would be of limited relevance to developing countries because high quality implementation of rights is generally not an immediate possibility in those countries. Developing countries do not run afoul of indivisibility if they implement some rights before others.

This essay discusses the grounds for due process rights (DPRs) and the permissibility of suspending them during terrorist and other emergencies. The two topics are profitably treated together because DPRs - along with freedoms of movement, expression, and political participation - are often suspended or restricted when national emergencies occur. Although I present a strong case for DPRs as human rights, this justification does not settle their priority during emergency situations. That issue raises additional questions, and I discuss some of them. The overall thrust of the essay is to defend the importance of respecting DPRs during troubled times. The penultimate section discusses DPRs in the context of the "war on terror" in the United States.

This article proposes that we view freedom of religion as a specific application area of more general basic liberties such as freedoms of thought, expression, association, assembly, movement, privacy, political participation, and economic activity. Separate enumeration of freedom of religion in national and international bills of rights may be useful, but it is not indispensable. In this respect freedom of religion is more like scientific freedom or artistic freedom than like freedom of expression. Recognizing that separate enumeration of freedom of religion is dispensable has salutary consequences for how we conceive and justify freedom as it applies to religion. First, we see that the general grounds of the basic liberties will also be the grounds of religious freedom. Second, we gain a broad and ecumenical scope for freedom of religion that extends into areas such as association, movement, politics, and business. Third, this perspective helps us avoid a narrow clause-bound focus in interpreting freedom of religion. Finally, this approach helps us resist exaggerating the priority of freedom of religion.