Vocabulary Of Rights Research Articles

Reframing human rights: the global network of moral conservative homeschooling activists

AbstractIn this article, we investigate the composition and actions of a principled issue network within the field of human rights that uses rights‐claims to pursue traditionalist goals: the moral conservative pro‐homeschooling network. We analyse the rising importance of homeschooling within the global moral conservative movement and examine the transnationalization of pro‐homeschooling advocacy. We show that the transnational homeschooling advocacy network, while not successful in court cases, has managed to establish home education as part of a global conservative agenda and has made incursions into redefining the terms of the debate within international organizations. Moral conservative homeschooling advocates use a vocabulary of rights and freedoms, and even of moral pluralism, but in the conservative reading human rights are reframed and used to defend a pro‐family agenda that establishes the patriarchal family as the ultimate source of authority and the primary carrier of rights.

UNA CONCEPCIÓN PRAGMATISTA DE LOS DERECHOS

El artículo se pregunta qué sentido tiene la práctica de conferir o reconocer derechos y sostiene que son sus consecuencias lo que nos interesa y lo que hace sensata la práctica relacionada con ellos. La virtud de esta tesis es que permite aterrizar el vocabulario aéreo de los derechos y que invita a determinar sus contenidos específicos con la mayor precisión posible. Se trata de una tesis realista y pragmatista respecto de los derechos. Realista, porque busca comprender en qué consiste realmente ser titular de derechos; pragmatista, en la medida en que, para hacerlo, se interesa por las consecuencias de su titularidad. El artículo busca también mostrar el modo en que una tesis pragmatista sobre los derechos puede dar cuenta de los derechos fundamentales.

Access to Energy: Human Rights Perspective - Indian Experience

Access to energy in fast emerging and shrinking world is no more a subject matter of luxury of a few. It is indispensable for the enjoyment of other enumerated human rights. Hence, the paper explores the position of access to energy on the landscape of human rights. Human rights are ever-growing phenomenon wherein the contents are evolved keeping the need of the society and individuals in mind. The paper starts with the idea of human rights and analyses evolution of human rights. Further, it highlights the expansion of human rights discourse by identifying addition of new rights in the vocabulary of rights. With growth of human civilization, the discourse of human rights is also graduating and energy is emerging as an indispensable tool for attainment of respectable life. Next section signifies that the access to energy is essential to realize different rights and therefore it rightly constitutes as an element of human rights. In conclusion, the paper presents the importance of right to energy in human rights discourse.

ONCE MORE BEYOND CONSENSUS: THE “TRANSNATIONAL TURN” AND AMERICAN LIBERAL NATIONALISM

“It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies,” Richard Hofstadter famously wrote, “but to be one.” Defining that “American ideology” or “American creed” obsessed scholars of the consensus era, who celebrated (and occasionally lamented) Americans’ allegiance to a limited liberal vocabulary of rights, freedoms, and markets. The cultural transformations begun in the 1960s seemed to question the very idea of a unitary culture or creed, but some historians responded by exploring alternative ideological founding myths to the liberal consensus. Over the ensuing decades scholars mounted formidable efforts to support republicanism or millennial Christianity as challengers, but liberalism proved a resilient foe. And it seemed to have contemporary history on its side: during the Reagan revolution of the century's final decades the classic liberal combination of scaled-down government and free markets carried the day as Americans’ ideal if not their reality. The Lockean liberal tradition that Louis Hartz described a half-century earlier still appeared the only game in town, although scholars continued to argue over its terms, history, and boundaries.

Christophe Tournu, Milton, Rights and LibertiesMilton, Rights and Liberties. Edited by ChristopheTournu and NeilForsyth. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. Pp. viii+522.

<i>Christophe Tournu,</i> Milton, Rights and Liberties<i>Milton, Rights and Liberties</i>. Edited by ChristopheTournu and NeilForsyth. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. Pp. viii+522.

Bringing Socio-Economic Rights Back into the Mainstream

Human rights values have an ever-growing impact on contemporary societies. However, socio-economic rights remain the poor cousins of their civil and political counterparts. Recent “revitalization” of the key international socio-economic rights instruments, along with the emergence of new models of constitutional protection of these rights in Latin America, India and South Africa, has generated considerable interest. However, socio-economic rights remain by and large marginal, because of often outdated philosophical assumptions as to their lack of substantive content. This often means that our sophisticated vocabulary of rights is of little use to the homeless or the destitute or other disadvantaged groups. As a first step to combating the marginalisation of socio-economic rights, it is necessary that bodies charged with interpreting and applying socio-economic rights develop a rigorous, rational and coherent jurisprudence, to show that socio-economic rights can be given a substantive and meaningful content.

Religious Transformations and the Language of Rights in Latin America

Three elements combine to shape the relation of religion and politics in Latin America now and in the future: the facts of religious plurality and pluralism; the emergence of real social and political pluralism in a context of democracy; and the creation and diffusion of a practical vocabulary of rights that includes the defense of human rights, but goes further to promote the creation of autonomous subjects able to claim voice and participation in public life. The creation of a vocabulary of rights, with roots in social, religious, and political norms and practices, provides a theoretical and empirical bridge between religion and politics.

Politicization as a strategy for recognition and enforcement of human rights in Kenya

Drawing from recent advocacy efforts on the right to education in Kenya, this article argues that linking human rights to local political struggles is a useful way of ensuring their realization. Human rights are legal and moral but their realization is a political project. The form that this project takes will differ from context to context. While paying due regard to the remarkable contribution of international human rights regimes and transnational advocacy of the last fifty years in providing the world with a powerful legal and moral vocabulary of rights, this article suggests that this vocabulary risks losing its edge unless those working in the field of human rights recognize the necessity of local politics. The article examines the activities of the Kenyan human rights movement and its strategic linking of access to basic education with repression of political freedoms.

The Wrong Vocabulary of Right: Minority Rights and the Boundaries of Political Community

International law has long concerned itself with the boundaries of political communities that it regards as sovereign states. Yet when it engages questions about the nature and scope of rights that individuals and groups possess in the face of sovereign authority, it invariably assumes that international human rights should protect universal features of what it means to be a human being. This paper argues that international human rights law ought to advance a richer mission than what universalism presupposes, one that is much more closely related to normative questions surrounding the allocation, distribution and protection of sovereign authority. One dimension of this mission is to promote a just international distribution of sovereign authority, which implicates a different vocabulary of human rights - one that draws on the normative force of the principle of self-determination. This vocabulary has yet to be developed in no small measure because the field has been defined by the language of universalism. Its development would have the effect of casting debates in democratic theory about the legitimacy of minority rights in different terms. Instead of assuming the legitimacy of the boundaries of the broader political community in which minority rights are claimed, it would comprehend minority rights as mechanisms that possess the potential - depending on their nature and scope - to vest democracy's edges with normative significance.

Needs, Rights, and Collective Obligations

Normative political discussion can be conducted in a variety of different vocabularies. One such is the vocabulary of rights; another is that of needs. Others, with which I shall be less immediately concerned, are the vocabularies of common good and perhaps—although one might regard it as such a general term as to be common to almost all the terms in which one might conduct normative discourse—that of moral obligation.

Needs, Rights, and Collective Obligations

Normative political discussion can be conducted in a variety of different vocabularies. One such is the vocabulary of rights; another is that of needs. Others, with which I shall be less immediately concerned, are the vocabularies of common good and perhaps-although one might regard it as such a general term as to be common to almost all the terms in which one might conduct normative discourse-that of moral obligation.

By the Sweat of Your Brow: Reflections on Work and the Workplace in Classic Jewish Thought (review)

Reviewed by: By the Sweat of Your Brow: Reflections on Work and the Workplace in Classic Jewish Thought Asher Meir By the Sweat of Your Brow: Reflections on Work and the Workplace in Classic Jewish Thought, by David J. Schnall. New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2001. 236 pp. $29.50. The Jewish people have been defining their relationship to work for thousands of years, ever since Avraham was accumulating “flocks and herds and donkeys” (Bereshit 12:16), and Yaakov was setting an example by working for Lavan “with all my might” (Bereshit 31:6.). It may seem surprising that meaningful, interesting, and consistent insights about work and the workplace can be extracted from a tradition so ancient and diverse. Yet Professor Schnall has done a remarkable job in presenting a coherent approach to this topic based on Jewish sources widely varied in time, economic background, and purpose. Scripture and stricture, midrash and minhag merge to give us a distinctive Jewish approach in which work is dignified without being glorified. The author, a dean and professor at New York’s Yeshiva University, is a respected expert in the field of workplace relations. In this book he combines his secular expertise on this subject with his considerable Jewish learning, resulting in a work which makes Jewish workplace ethics comprehensible and accessible to a broad audience. Most of the book’s nine chapters cover topics of universal interest such as the work ethic, the social responsibility of business, and the special relationship to public servants. There is also a very interesting chapter on a controversial topic which has long been central in Jewish life: the proper balance between work and Torah study. The final chapter draws some intriguing practical conclusions. [End Page 142] Let us examine some examples of the pragmatic, non-ideological approach which emerges. Work, as we mentioned, is dignified but not glorified. While the Bible intro duces labor “as a scourge and punishment to mankind,” the author comments that “normative rabbinic sources largely ignore this passage in their consideration of the place of work in the social scheme. Neither a curse nor purely an instrumental necessity of subsistence, they look upon it as an ennobling facet of moral development” (pp. 46–47). In contrast to the modern drive for equality, “the social goal pursued by the interpreters of the tradition was not equality per se, but rather moral reciprocity and balance” (p. 16). In particular, a consistent, even relentless series of laws and admoni tions militates against any dimension of servitude in the employer-employee relation ship. Economic equality is not pursued, and economic success is in any case viewed as a pleasant amenity rather than as an important social or religious objective. The author does a good job in explaining the significance of Judaism’s obligation- based approach to human relations, which is not easily recast in the modern-day vocabulary of rights. In the context of this insight, the book explains that the employer’s obligation to treat the worker fairly is balanced by the employee’s obligation to be assiduous in his or her performance. A particular emphasis of the book is that Judaism does not prescribe or exalt any particular economic system. The general deference to local custom, or minhag, guaran tees a degree of tolerance and pragmatism in regard to the economic superstructure. The concern of Jewish law and thought is not to dictate a particular structure, but rather to provide that no matter what type of economic structure society chooses, safeguards exist to guarantee the dignity and protection of the worker and the possibility of the employer to get the job done. The book’s focus is descriptive, not comparative. While the author does present a cogent summary of alternative religious and ideological approaches to work and the workplace, these serve primarily to provide a context and a frame of reference for the book’s conclusions, and not as an independent topic of study. Perhaps the most significant contribution of the book is that it clearly aims at relevance. The book is written in a professional and accessible idiom; the author brings many modern-day applications and makes interesting prescriptive diagnoses. Professor Schnall clearly...

The good death, virtue, and physician-assisted death: an examination of the hospice way of death.

The problem of physician-assisted death (PAD), assisted suicide and active euthanasia, has been debated predominantly in the ethically familiar vocabulary of rights, duties, and consequences. Patient autonomy and the right to die with dignity vie with the duty of physicians to heal, but not to kill, and the specter of “the slippery slope” from voluntary euthanasia as a last resort for patients suffering from terminal illness to PAD on demand and mercy killing of “hopeless” incompetent patients. Another dimension of the debate over PAD concerns the evaluative question of what constitutes a good death. At stake are Issues of character and virtue in the face of death and dying and their Implications for legitimizing the practice of PAD. Critics of PAD argue that “natural” death in the context of comfort care, as provided by hospice programs, isthegood death. In contrast, PAD amounts to an easy way out, an evasion of the ultimate human challenge and task of dying. Because hospice care is clearly preferable to PAD, the former should be encouraged and the latter remain prohibited.

Rights and Utilitarianism

Few questions about utilitarianism have been more vexed than that of its relation to rights (and its associated notion, Justice). It is commonplace to hold that there are nonutilitarian rights, rights not founded on considerations of utility. And it is even thought that the very notion of rights is inherently incapable of being significantly employed within the utilitarian framework. In the present paper, I wish to consider both of these matters. I propose to give reasons—mostly not really new—for rejecting the stronger, conceptual claim; and on the former, substantial question, I want to argue that the utilitarian at least has a respectable way of handling the vocabulary of rights, even a useful one. Further, I shall argue that what the utilitarian—in particular, J. S. Mill—has to say about rights is quite plausible, though I shall conclude with a question about how illuminating it is.