Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World

Cover

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Front Matter

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Contents

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pp. v-vi

Acknowledgments

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pp. vii-viii

Thanks are due to several persons and institutions that have been vital to bringing this project to completion. While I was an undergraduate at Stanford University, Philip J. Ivanhoe, Van Harvey, and Timothy P. Jackson first pointed me toward graduate school to pursue further work on the relationship between philosophical and ...

Introduction

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pp. 1-10

On December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) without a single dissenting vote. The document was novel in declaring that every human being, without “distinction of any kind,” possesses a set of morally authoritative rights and fundamental freedoms that ...

One: Prolegomena to Any Philosophical Defense of Human Rights

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pp. 11-30

This book is concerned with the prospect of justifying human rights. As such, it defends the twin ideas that there are moral claims and demands that apply to everyone and that those involving human rights can be safely counted among them. This first chapter is offered in the spirit of prolegomena: it will not set out to establish the universal validity of human rights but will ...

Two: The Maximalist Challenge to Human Rights Justification

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pp. 31-56

Maximalist approaches to human rights make direct appeals to matters of first philosophy or religion for their ultimate justification. These premises affect their underlying rationale for human rights as well as the set of liberties or goods that will even be counted as human rights. Further distinguishing maximalist from minimalist approaches ...

Three: An Enforcement-Centered Approach to Human Rights, with Special Reference to John Rawls

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pp. 57-76

What if we were to justify a doctrine of universal human rights according to the political role they were to play in the international arena and not on any account of inherent human dignity or worth? We would presumably evade the need to identify the dignity- or worth-making feature common to all human beings, bypass seemingly intractable ...

Four: Consensus-Based Approaches to Human Rights

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pp. 77-100

Consensus-based approaches to human rights retain an insight discussed in the previous chapter that different peoples can endorse the same list of provisions for markedly dissimilar final reasons. Such ecumenicism requires the official account of human rights to be theory-thin at the level of practical standards, thus allowing different parties ...

Five: The Capability Approach to Human Rights

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pp. 101-130

The capability approach, also known as the “capabilities approach,” is a broad conceptual framework increasingly used today to compare the quality of life across nations, evaluate the design of public policies, and assess the justice of social institutions. Simply put, this framework seeks to advance the positive freedoms of all individuals ...

Six: Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World

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pp. 131-172

As we have seen, it is no easy feat to provide a justification for human rights that would be robust enough to make sense of the powerful claims that the very idea makes as well as suitable under conditions of pluralism. In partial reaction to this difficulty, some have argued that the search for an underlying theoretical rationale ...

Notes

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pp. 173-206

References

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pp. 207-224

INDEX

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pp. 225-239