Notion Of Individual Rights Research Articles

Lawyers and the Legal Business of the Cherokee Republic in Courts of the United States, 1829–1835

When Europeans first arrived, the Native American societies of North America had a variety of systems of social control and conflict mediation. These indigenous peoples were not heir to the concept of equal protection of the law derived from the Magna Carta, nor to notions of individual rights defended in the English Bill of Rights (1689) and Western Enlightenment political thought. Theirs were systems of custom and commandment of their own need and development. Therefore, after the contact period, whenever conflict arose a central issue of cultural pluralism surfaced: whose resolution system would be used when mediation was necessary.

The Chinese Moral Ethos and the Concept of Individual Rights

This paper is concerned with the contrast in views between traditional mainstream Chinese philosophy and Western liberal individualism on the importance of the concept of individual rights in social and political thought. The contrast is striking because, whereas individual and political rights have long featured in public discourse in the West, in China, mainstream social and political thought has developed without a notion of individual rights. In search of the significance of this major difference, the paper traces ideas of the self in China through Confucian ethics, and compares the Confucian conception of the self with the deontological liberal conception of the subject as a bearer of rights in the West. Having established that the Chinese way of thinking about the self and about moral agency is in stark contrast to the image of the self as a bearer of rights in the deontological conception, the paper goes on to discuss the inadequacy of the moral individualism of a rights-based morality and argues for an alternative view of morality which places importance on the intrinsic value of collective goods and on membership in a society.

Liberal Rights and the Ethics of Homicide

According to its author, Engineered Death is not a book about the morality of homicide but about intellectual self-consistency—in particular about the self-consistency of the “liberal” view of homicide. The “liberal” view is defined by Woods as the view that murder is morally wrong because, and only because, it is a violation of rights. He tells us that he is concerned to defend neither liberalism in general nor its notion of individual rights in particular, but only to work out the implications of these assumptions for the problems of abortion, suicide, euthanasia, and senecide. It is only in this sense that Woods' disclaimer about the non-ethical nature of his book can be taken seriously. In every other respect it is a treatise on ethics. It puts forward and defends moral theses that are independent of, and in some cases even contrary to, traditional ethical liberalism.