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On Human Rights
James Griffin
360 pages
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234x156mm
978-0-19-957310-3
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Paperback
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27 August 2009
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- Long-awaited study of the foundations of human rights
- Griffin is one of the world's leading moral philosophers
- Highly topical; recent international events mean that human rights are the focus of increasing attention
- Written for a broad readership in philosophy, politics, law, and beyond
- Essential reading for anyone with an interest in this controversial issue
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.Readership: Scholars and advanced students of political, moral, and
legal philosophy; anyone with an interest in human rights.
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James Griffin, Emeritus, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford
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"Arguably the most significant philosophical meditation on human rights... [since] the Universal Declaration of Human Rights... Not only the most powerful, fully elaborated contemporary philosophical contribution to the topic, but also one that has put in place many of the foundations on which any future work should build." - John Tasioulas, Ethics "This book is a masterpiece... it will be studied for a long time to come" - Brad Hooker, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies
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Introduction
Part I: An Account of Human Rights
I: Human Rights: The Incomplete Idea
II: First Steps in An Account of Human Rights
III: When Human Rights Conflict
IV: Whose Rights?
V: My Rights: But Whose Duties?
VI: The Metaphysics of Human Rights
VII: The Relativity and Ethnocentricity of Human Rights
Part II: Highest Level Human Rights
VIII: Autonomy
IX: Liberty
X: Welfare
Part III: Applications
XI: Discrepanices Between the Best Philosophical Account of Human Rights and the International Law of Human Rights
XII: A Right to Life, A Right to Death
XIII: Privacy
XIV: Do Human Rights Require Democracy?
XV: Group Rights
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