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What makes something a human right? What is the relationship between the moral foundations of human rights and human rights law? What are the difficulties of appealing to human rights?This book offers the first comprehensive survey of current thinking on the philosophical foundations of human rights. Divided into four parts, this book focuses firstly on the moral grounds of human rights, for example in our dignity, agency, interests or needs. Secondly, it looks at the implications that different moral perspectives on human rights bear for human rights law and politics. Thirdly, it discusses specific and topical human rights including freedom of expression and religion,security, health and more controversial rights such as a human right to subsistence. The final part discusses nuanced critical and reformative views on human rights from feminist, Kantian and relativist perspectives among others.The essays represent new and canonical research by leading scholars in the field. Each section is structured as a set of essays and replies, offering a comprehensive analysis of different positions within the debate in question. The introduction from the editors will guide researchers and students navigating the diversity of views on the philosophical foundations of human rights.
List of contents
- Introduction: the Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights
- Human Rights' Foundations
- 1: John Tasioulas: On the Foundations of Human Rights
- 2: Onora O'Neill: Response to John Tasioulas
- 3: S. Matthew Liao: Human Rights as Fundamental Conditions for a Good Life
- 4: Rowan Cruft: From a Good Life to Human Rights: Some Complications
- 5: Jeremy Waldron: Is Dignity the Foundation of Human Rights?
- 6: A. John Simmons: Human Rights, Natural Rights, and Human Dignity
- 7: James W. Nickel: Personal Deserts and Human Rights
- 8: Zofia Stemplowska: Desert and Human Rights: Response to James W. Nickel
- 9: Carol Gould: A Social Ontology of Human Rights
- 10: Pablo Gilabert: Human Rights, Human Dignity, and Power
- Human Rights in Law and Politics
- 11: Joseph Raz: Human Rights in the Emerging World Order
- 12: David Miller: Joseph Raz on Human Rights: A Critical Appraisal
- 13: Allen Buchanan: Why International Legal Human Rights?
- 14: David Luban: Response to Buchanan
- 15: Samantha Besson: Human Rights and Constitutional Law: Patterns of Mutual Validation and Legitimation
- 16: Saladin Meckled-Garcia: Response to Besson
- 17: George Letsas: Rescuing Proportionality
- 18: Guglielmo Verdirame: Response to Letsas
- Canonical and Contested Human Rights
- 19: Corey Brettschneider: Free Speech as an Inverted Right and Democratic Persuasion
- 20: Larry Alexander: Free Speech and "Democratic Persuasion"
- 21: Lorenzo Zucca: Prince or Pariah? The place of Freedom of Religion in a system of International human rights
- 22: Robert Audi: Freedom of Religion Conceived as a Human Right
- 23: Liora Lazarus: The Right to Security
- 24: Victor Tadros: Rights and Security
- 25: Thomas Christiano: Self Determination and the Human Right to Democracy
- 26: Fabienne Peter: A Human Right to Democracy?
- 27: Jonathan Wolff: The Content of the Human Right to Health
- 28: Kimberley Brownlee: Do We have a Human Right to the Political Determinants of Health?
- 29: Elizabeth Ashford: A Moral Inconsistency Argument for a Basic Human Right to Subsistence
- 30: Charles R. Beitz: The Force of Subsistence Rights
- Human Rights: Concerns and Alternatives
- 32: Massimo Renzo: Human Needs, Human Rights, and Parochialism
- 33: Katrin Flikschuh: Human Rights in Kantian Mode: a Sketch
- 34: Andrea Sangiovanni: Why There Cannot Be A Truly Kantian Theory of Human Rights
- 35: Jiwei Ci: Liberty Rights and the Limits of Liberal Democracy
- 36: Simon Hope: Human Rights without the Human Good? A Reply to Ci
- 37: Virginia Held: Care and Human Rights
- 38: Susan Mendus: Care and Human Rights: A Reply to Virginia Held
About the author
Rowan Cruft is a senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Stirling. He has published articles on the nature and justification of rights and duties, focusing on the relationship between rights, respect and individualism. His work aims to reveal the comparative importance of different forms of right including human rights, natural rights, contractual rights, property rights, legal rights.
Massimo Renzo is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. His main research interests are in the problems of authority, political obligation, international justice and the philosophical foundations of the criminal law. He is co-editor, with R.A. Duff, Lindsay Farmer, Sandra Marshall and Victor Tadros, of the volumes The Constitutions of the Criminal Law (OUP 2010) and The Structures of the Criminal Law (OUP 2011).
S. Matthew Liao is Director of the Bioethics Program and Affiliated Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He is also Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Moral Philosophy. His research interests include ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, moral psychology, and bioethics.
Summary
This book brings together a set of essays on the philosophical foundations of human rights, along with critical replies. It is the first comprehensive survey of the topic, comprising of research essays from academics in the fields of law, philosophy, international relations, social science and economics
