- 240 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Why Human Rights addresses universal human rights as moral mandates – rights to justice that all persons have by virtue of their humanity alone. These are not the legal rights of statutes and treaties, but moral rights of the kind Gandhi, King, and Mandela invoked to oppose unjust laws. All such rights presuppose three claims: (1) that some duties of justice apply universally, (2) that all human beings have equal moral significance, and (3) that states must protect or serve certain individual interests regardless of the societal impact of doing so.
Can these three premises be justified? Is the human equality claim, for example, rationally supportable, or is it no less faith-based than hierarchical doctrines like caste? This book explores the case for these foundational claims along with other philosophical controversies pertaining to human rights. Because these issues lie at the heart of moral and political philosophy, readers will also obtain a broad appreciation of these disciplines and their leading theorists, including Mill, Kant, Rawls, Sandel, Nozick, Rorty, and many others. Written in concise, jargon-free language, this book presents a high-relief map of the philosophical issues surrounding human rights.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Endorsements
- Half Title
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I: Universality, Relativism, and Diversity
- 1 How Are Human Rights Universal?
- 2 Relativist Objections
- 3 Diversity and Indeterminacy
- 4 The Limits of Skepticism
- Part II: Human Equality and Moral Hierarchies
- 5 Human Moral Equality: The Claim and Its Challenges
- 6 Theories of Moral Considerability
- Part III: Individual Rights and Collective Interests
- 7 The Domain of Rights
- 8 Justifying Rights
- 9 Liberty, Equality, and Community: Complements or Competitors?
- Appendix A: Rawls' Evolution from Liberal Rights in A Theory of Justice to Human Rights in The Law of Peoples
- Appendix B: The Case of Aspirational Economic Rights
- Appendix C: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- References
- Index