Philosophical Dimensions of Human Rights: Some Contemporary Views

Description

This book presents a unique collection of the most relevant perspectives in contemporary human rights philosophy. Different intellectual traditions are brought together to explore some of the core postmodern issues challenging standard justifications. Widely accessible also to non experts, contributions aim at opening new perspectives on the state of the art of the philosophy of human rights. This makes this book particularly suitable to human rights experts as well as master and doctoral students. Further, while conceived in a uniform and homogeneous way, the book is internally organized around three central themes: an introduction to theories of rights and their relation to values; a set of contributions presenting some of the most influential contemporary strategies; and finally a number of articles evaluating those empirical challenges springing from the implementation of human rights. This specific set-up of the book provides readers with a stimulating presentation of a growing and interconnecting number of problems that post-natural law theories face today. While most of the contributions are new and specifically conceived for the present occasion, the volume includes also some recently published influential essays on rights, democracy and their political implementation. Front Matter....Pages i-xxix Front Matter....Pages 1-1 Human Rights in History and Contemporary Practice: Source Materials for Philosophy....Pages 3-22 Philosophy and Human Rights: Contemporary Perspectives....Pages 23-44 Reconsidering Realism on Rights....Pages 45-60 Front Matter....Pages 61-61 The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights....Pages 63-79 The Justification of Human Rights and the Basic Right to Justification. A Reflexive Approach....Pages 81-106 Social Harm, Political Judgment, and the Pragmatics of Justification....Pages 107-123 “It All Depends”: The Universal and the Contingent in Human Rights....Pages 125-156 Tiny Sparks of Contingency. On the Aesthetics of Human Rights....Pages 157-172 The Idea of a Charter of Fundamental Human Rights....Pages 173-187 Front Matter....Pages 189-189 Is There a Human Right to Democracy? Beyond Interventionism and Indifference....Pages 191-213 Dialectical Snares: Human Rights and Democracy in the World Society....Pages 215-230 The Normality of Constitutional Politics: An Analysis of the Drafting of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights....Pages 231-252 Rights in Progress. The Politics of Rights and the Democracy-Building Processes in Comparative Perspective....Pages 253-263 Ethnopolitics. The Challenge for Human and Minority Rights Protection....Pages 265-291 Human Rights in the Information Society: Utopias, Dystopias and Human Values....Pages 293-307 Back Matter....Pages 309-319