Download or read book On Human Rights written by James Griffin and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-08-27 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a human right? How can we tell whether a proposed human right really is one? How do we establish the content of particular human rights, and how do we resolve conflicts between them? These are pressing questions for philosophers, political theorists, jurisprudents, international lawyers, and activists. James Griffin offers answers in his compelling new investigation of the foundations of human rights. First, On Human Rights traces the idea of a natural right from its origin in the late Middle Ages, when the rights were seen as deriving from natural laws, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the original theological background was progressively dropped and 'natural law' emptied of most of its original meaning. By the end of the Enlightenment, the term 'human rights' (droits de l'homme) appeared, marking the purge of the theological background. But the Enlightenment, in putting nothing in its place, left us with an unsatisfactory, incomplete idea of a human right. Griffin shows how the language of human rights has become debased. There are scarcely any accepted criteria, either in the academic or the public sphere, for correct use of the term. He takes on the task of showing the way towards a determinate concept of human rights, based on their relation to the human status that we all share. He works from certain paradigm cases, such as freedom of expression and freedom of worship, to more disputed cases such as welfare rights - for instance the idea of a human right to health. His goal is a substantive account of human rights - an account with enough content to tell us whether proposed rights really are rights. Griffin emphasizes the practical as well as theoretical urgency of this goal: as the United Nations recognized in 1948 with its Universal Declaration, the idea of human rights has considerable power to improve the lot of humanity around the world. We can't do without the idea of human rights, and we need to get clear about it. It is our job now - the job of this book - to influence and develop the unsettled discourse of human rights so as to complete the incomplete idea.
Download or read book Griffin on Human Rights written by Roger Crisp and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents responses to the work of James Griffin, one of the most significant contributors to the contemporary debate over human rights. Leading moral and political philosophers engage with Griffin's views - according to which human rights are best understood as protections of our agency and personhood - and Griffin offers his own reply.
Download or read book The Heart of Human Rights written by Allen Buchanan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-23 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first attempt to provide an in-depth moral assessment of the heart of the modern human rights enterprise: the system of international legal human rights. It is international human rights law--not any philosophical theory of moral human rights or any "folk" conception of moral human rights--that serves as the lingua franca of modern human rights practice. Yet contemporary philosophers have had little to say about international legal human rights. They have tended to assume, rather than to argue, that international legal human rights, if morally justified, must mirror or at least help realize moral human rights. But this assumption is mistaken. International legal human rights, like many other legal rights, can be justified by several different types of moral considerations, of which the need to realize a corresponding moral right is only one. Further, this volume shows that some of the most important international legal human rights cannot be adequately justified by appeal to corresponding moral human rights. The problem is that the content of these international legal human rights--the full set of correlative duties--is much broader than can be justified by appealing to the morally important interests of any individual. In addition, it is necessary to examine the legitimacy of the institutions that create, interpret, and implement international human rights law and to defend the claim that international human rights law should "trump" the domestic law of even the most admirable constitutional democracies.
Download or read book Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights written by Rowan Cruft and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readership: This book would be suitable for students, academics and scholars of law, philosophy, politics, international relations and economics
Download or read book Black Like Me written by John Howard Griffin and published by Signet Book. This book was released on 1976 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This American classic has been corrected from the original manuscripts and indexed, featuring historic photographs and an extensive biographical afterword.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Human Rights written by Gerhard Ernst and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of “human rights” is widely used in political and moral discussions. The core idea, that all human beings have some inalienable basic rights, is appealing and has an eminently practical function: It allows moral criticism of various wrongs and calls for action in order to prevent them. On the other hand it is unclear what exactly a human right is. Human rights lack a convincing conceptual foundation that would be able to compel the wrong-doer to accept human rights claims as well-founded. Hence the practical function faces theoretical doubts. The present collection takes up the tension between the wide political use of human rights claims and the intellectual skepticism about them. In particular two major issues are identified that call for conceptual clarification in order to better understand human rights claims both in theory and in practice: the question of how to justify human rights and the tension between universal normative claims and particular moralities.
Download or read book Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights written by Rowan Cruft and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readership: This book would be suitable for students, academics and scholars of law, philosophy, politics, international relations and economics
Download or read book Can We Still Afford Human Rights written by Jan Wouters and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-30 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This insightful book offers a critical reflection on the sustainability and effectiveness of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and its legacy over the last 70 years. Exploring the problems surrounding universality, proliferation and costs, it asks the provocative question, can we still afford human rights?
Download or read book Can Human Rights Survive written by Conor Gearty and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-18 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this set of three essays, originally presented as the 2005 Hamlyn Lectures, Conor Gearty considers whether human rights can survive the challenges of the war on terror, the revival of political religion, and the steady erosion of the world's natural resources. He also looks deeper than this to consider the fundamental question: How can we tell what human rights are? In his first essay, Gearty asks how the idea of human rights needs to be made to work in our age of relativism, uncertainty and anxiety. In the second, he assesses how the idea of human rights has coped with its incorporation in legal form in the UK Human Rights Act, arguing that the record is much better and more democratic than many human rights enthusiasts allow. In his final essay, Gearty confronts the challenges that may destroy the language of human rights for the generations that follow us.
Download or read book P C Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights written by Hans Ingvar Roth and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-09-10 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is one of the world's best-known and most translated documents. When it was presented to the United Nations General Assembly in December in 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the writing group, called it a new "Magna Carta for all mankind." The passage of time has shown Roosevelt to have been largely correct in her prediction as to the declaration's importance. No other document in the world today can claim a comparable standing in the international community. Roosevelt and French legal expert René Cassin have often been represented as the principal authors of the declaration. But in fact, it resulted from a collaborative effort involving a number of individuals in different capacities. One of the declaration's most important authors was the vice chairman of the Human Rights Commission, Peng Chun Chang (1892-1957), a Chinese diplomat and philosopher whose contribution has been the focus of growing attention in recent years. Indeed, it is Chang who deserves the credit for the universality and religious ecumenism that are now regarded as the declaration's defining features. Despite this, Chang's extraordinary contribution has been overlooked by historians. Peng Chun Chang was a modern-day Renaissance man—teacher, scholar, university chancellor, playwright, diplomat, and politician. A true cosmopolitan, he was deeply involved in the cultural exchange between East and West, and the dramatic events of his life left a profound mark on his intellectual and political work. P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the first biography of this extraordinary actor on the world stage, who belonged to the same generation as Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. Drawing on previously unknown sources, it casts new light on Chang's multifaceted life and involvement with one of modern history's most important documents.
Download or read book Dignity written by Remy Debes and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In everything from philosophical ethics to legal argument to public activism, it has become commonplace to appeal to the idea of human dignity. In such contexts, the concept of dignity typically signifies something like the fundamental moral status belonging to all humans. Remarkably, however, it is only in the last century that this meaning of the term has become standardized. Before this, dignity was instead a concept associated with social status. Unfortunately, this transformation remains something of a mystery in existing scholarship. Exactly when and why did "dignity" change its meaning? And before this change, was it truly the case that we lacked a conception of human worth akin to the one that "dignity" now represents? In this volume, leading scholars across a range of disciplines attempt to answer such questions by clarifying the presently murky history of "dignity," from classical Greek thought through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment to the present day.
Download or read book What Can Philosophy Contribute To Ethics written by James Griffin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-29 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethics appears early in the life of a culture. It is not the creation of philosophers. Many philosophers today think that their job is to take the ethics of their society in hand, analyse it into parts, purge the bad ideas, and organize the good into a systematic moral theory. The philosophers' ethics that results is likely to be very different from the culture's raw ethics and, they think, being better, should replace it. But few of us, even among philosophers, settle real-life moral questions by consulting the Categorical Imperative or the Principle of Utility, largely because, if we do, we often do not trust the outcome or cannot even reliably enough decide what it is. By contrast, James Griffin explores the question what philosophers can reasonably expect to contribute to normative ethics or to the ethics of a culture. Griffin argues that moral philosophers must tailor their work to what ordinary humans' motivational capabilities, and he offers a new account of moral deliberation.
Download or read book Suffering in Silence written by Karen Human Rights Group and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2001 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Situated in the triangle between South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China, Burma is a country of 50 million people struggling under the oppression of one of the world's most brutal military regimes. Yet, the voices of its people remain largely unheard in the international arena. Most of the limited media coverage deals with the non-violent struggle for democracy led by Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi or the Army's repression of university students and urban dissidents, but these only form a small part of the story. This book presents the voices of ethnic Karen villagers to give an idea of what it is like to be a rural villager in Burma: the brutal and constant shifts of forced labor for the Army, the intimidation tactics, the systematic extortion and looting by Army and State authorities, the constant fear of arbitrary arrest, rape, torture, and summary execution, the forced relocation and burning of hundreds of civilian villages and the systematic uprooting of their crops. Three detailed reports produced by the Karen Human Rights Group in 1999 are used to give the reader a sampling of the life of Karen villagers, both in areas where there is armed resistance to the rule of the SPDC junta and in areas where the junta is fully in control. The Karen Human Rights Group is a small and independent local organization which has been using the firsthand testimony of villagers to document the human rights situation in rural Burma since 1992. Much of the group's work can be seen online at www.khrg.org. Kevin Heppner, who contributed the introductory sections of the book, is a Canadian volunteer who founded KHRG in 1992 and still serves as its coordinator. Claudio Delang, who edited this book, has a keen interest in Karen life and customs. He is currently completing a PhD dissertation on the Karen and Hmong in northern Thailand.
Download or read book Beyond Human Rights written by Anne Peters and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 645 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Human Rights, previously published in German and now available in English, is a historical and doctrinal study about the legal status of individuals in international law.
Download or read book A Companion to Applied Philosophy written by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-09-19 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Applied philosophy has been a growing area of research for the last 40 years. Until now, however, almost all of this research has been centered around the field of ethics. A Companion to Applied Philosophy breaks new ground, demonstrating that all areasof philosophy, including epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind, can be applied, and are relevant to questions of everyday life. This perennial topic in philosophy provides an overview of these various applied philosophy developments, highlighting similarities and differences between various areas of applied philosophy, and examining the very nature of this topic. It is an area to which many of the towering figures in the history of philosophy have contributed, and this timely Companion demonstrates how various historical contributions are actually contributions within applied philosophy, even if they are not traditionally seen as such. The Companion contains 42 essays covering major areas of philosophy; the articles themselves are all original contributions to the literature and represent the state of the art on this topic, as well as offering a map to the current debates.
Download or read book Making Sense of Human Rights written by James W. Nickel and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fully revised and extended edition of James Nickel's classic study explains and defends the contemporary conception of human rights. Combining philosophical, legal and political approaches, Nickel explains international human rights law and addresses questions of justification and feasibility. New, revised edition of James Nickel's classic study. Explains and defends the conception of human rights found in the" Universal Declaration of Human Rights" (1948) and subsequent treaties in a clear and lively style. Covers fundamental freedoms, due process rights, social rights, and minority rights. Updated throughout to include developments in law, politics, and theory since the publication of the first edition. New features for this edition include an extensive bibliography and a chapter on human rights and terrorism.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Global Justice written by Thom Brooks and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global justice is an exciting area of refreshing, innovative new ideas for a changing world facing significant challenges. Not only does work in this area often force us to rethink about ethics and political philosophy more generally, but its insights contain seeds of hope for addressing some of the greatest global problems facing humanity today. The Oxford Handbook of Global Justice has been selective in bringing together some of the most pressing topics and issues in global justice as understood by the leading voices from both established and rising stars across twenty-five new chapters. This Handbook explores severe poverty, climate change, egalitarianism, global citizenship, human rights, immigration, territorial rights, and much more.
