Suchergebnisse

"Jeremy Bentham described the idea of human rights as "rhetorical nonsense." In this book, which is proposed for the Moral Traditions series, William O'Neill shows that the rhetorical aspect of human rights is in fact crucial. He does so by examining how victims and their advocates embrace the rhetoric of human rights to tell their stories. It is a history of human rights "from below," showing what victims of atrocity and advocates do with rights. Using a group of American writings, including Desmond Tutu's on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, O'Neill reconciles the false dichotomy between the individualistic perspective of the human rights theory of Kant, Rousseau, and Rawls and the communitarian approach of Burke, Bentham, and Alasdair Macintyre. He shows that the testimony of the victims of atrocities leads us to a new conception of the common good, based both on abstract theories of individual human rights and the circumstances and history of particular societies. The book then applies this new approach to three areas: race and mass incarceration in the U.S, the politics of immigration and refugee policy, and our duties to the next generation and the non-human world"--

In this article, I assess rival liberal and communitarian ethical perspectives underlying contemporary debates regarding migration policy in the US. I then propose a critical via media in a rights-based ethics of solidarity with migrants. I conclude by addressing the distinctive role played by citizens of faith in a religiously pluralist polity like our own, noting, in particular, the place (locus) of Christian belief in immigration policy. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractModern Catholic social teaching recurs to the idiom of human dignity and human rights. Our moral entitlement toequalrespect or consideration, in concert with the ethical ideal of the common good, moreover, justifiespreferentialtreatment for those whose basic rights are most imperiled. Thus states are morally bound to respect and promote the basic human rights of both citizen and resident alien, especially the most vulnerable—and of these, in particular, women and children. Indeed, the duty to protect grounds the subsidiary duty to rescue, for example, through diplomatic initiatives, sanctions, andin extremis, humanitarian intervention in the case of genocide or mass atrocity. Disciples thus see and have compassion, even as compassion becomes a way of seeing. Compassion, then, not only guides them in the fitting application of universal, essential norms, for example, the rights of migrants, but gives rise to existential (personal and ecclesial) imperatives as they come to the aid of wounded humanity.