Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World

Contents

Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 One Prolegomena to Any Philosophical Defense of Human Rights 11 Cultural Relativism 11 Ethnocentrism 18 Two The Maximalist Challenge to Human Rights Justification 31 Maximalist Approaches in Human Rights Declarations and Documents 32 Why Human Rights Need Religion: A Sampling of Four Theoretical Accounts 35 A Preliminary Assessment of the Maximalist Challenge 49 Rising to the Maximalist Challenge 54 Three An Enforcement-Centered Approach to Human Rights, with Special Reference to John Rawls 57 A Primer on Rawls’s Conception of Global Justice 58 Human Rights in the Law of Peoples Compared to International Human Rights Law 61 Rawlsian Human Rights: An Assessment 68 Conclusion 75 v Four Consensus-Based Approaches to Human Rights 77 Obtaining a Cross-Cultural Consensus on Human Rights 78 Option 1: Consensus-Producing New Universal Human Rights Standards 81 Option 2: Consensus-Encouraging Plural Foundations for Human Rights 87 Beyond Shared Norms: Returning to the Original Sources of Inspiration 96 Five The Capability Approach to Human Rights 101 What Is the Capability Approach? A Primer 102 Comparing the Capability Approach to the Human Rights Framework 108 Justifying Human Capabilities and Human Rights 112 Enhancing Human Rights through the Framework of Capabilities 118 Revisiting the Question of Justification 125 Six Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World 131 Assessing and Retrieving Minimalist Strategies of Justification 134 Assessing and Retrieving Maximalist Approaches to Justification 146 Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World by Straddling the Minimalist–Maximalist Divide 152 Conclusion 170 Notes 173 References 207 Index 225 vi Contents ...