Somerville, Margaret Over the millennia of human history, the idea that children - at least those born into a marriage - had rights with respect to their biological parents was taken for granted and reflected in law and public policy. But with same-sex marriage, which gives same-sex spouses the right to found a family, that is no longer the case. Likewise, children's rights with respect to their biological origins were not an issue when there was no technoscience that (...) could be used to manipulate or change those origins: a baby could only be conceived in vivo through sexual reproduction. But with assisted human reproductive technologies and genetic technologies, that, too, is no longer the case. So, in light of these new realities, what are our obligations, as societies, to children with respect to their biological origins and biological families? What protections do children need and deserve? I propose that the most fundamental human right of all is a child's right to be born from natural human biological origins and that children also have human rights with respect to knowing who their biological parents and families are, and that these rights must be recognized. Children also have a right to be reared within their biological families and to have a mother and a father, unless an exception can be justified as being in the 'best interests' of a particular child. The connection among adoption, the use of new reproductive technologies, and same-sex marriage is that they all unlink child-parent biological bonds. Each context raises one or more of three important issues: children's right to know the identities of their biological parents; children's right to both a mother and a father, preferably their own biological parents; and children's right to come into being with genetic origins that have not been tampered with; that is, 'designing' our children should be prohibited. Such 'designing' would result in losses with implications far beyond those persons directly affected and far beyond the present time. It would undermine the rights to equality and freedom of future generations. Because the liberty and equality of all citizens is at the heart of democratic societal institutions and of the values that democratic societies promote, to create people who are neither free nor equal undermines those institutions and values. In short, not to prohibit 'designer children' would undermine the very foundations of our Western democratic societies. (shrink)

he article combines Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for common-pool resources and human rights provisions, including subsequent clarifications and jurisprudence. It analyses whether stronger local self-governance, embedded in the natural resource dimension of peoples’ rights to self-determination is a recommendable approach. Two changes in understanding are noted. First, the universal approval of indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination as specified in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Second, the wide endorsement of the specific principle of free (...) and prior informed consent. As the exercise of peoples’ rights to self-determination is done on a collective level, it is important to have awareness of whether particularly affected and marginalized households and individuals are included or not included in the decision-making process. The article then reviews a range of new instruments adopted by the OECD and the UN for improved human rights awareness and compliance in the context of economic investments. The article finds that these instruments are still underutilized. Finally, the article identifies the role of human rights in bilateral investment treaties. It finds that there are less jurisdictional restrictions – as many treaties have a wide understanding of applicable law – than cognitive restrictions – as human rights competence is rarely sought when establishing tribunals mandated to solve investments disputes. (shrink)

: Many people have lamented the proliferation of human rights claims. The cure for this problem, it may be thought, would be to develop a theory that can distinguish ‘real’ from ‘supposed’ human rights. I argue, however, that the proliferation of human rights mirrors a deep problem in human rights theory itself. Contemporary theories of natural rights to welfare are historical descendants from a theory of rights to subsistence which was developed in twelfth-century Europe. (...) According to this theory, each human being has a special role to fulfil in God's plan and therefore has inalienable rights to subsist. Later theories have secularized this idea by claiming that human beings are purposive agents. Secularization, however, comes at a price. In the case of these theories, the price is a failure to provide satisfactory answers to the most basic questions we would expect of a theory of natural rights to answer. They have failed to provide a basis for ascribing these rights to all and only to human beings. They have not been able to generate a clear and viable criterion for ascribing duties correlative to these rights. And they cannot limit rights-claims in a non-arbitrary way. Hence we should abandon these theories. (shrink)

Rights of nature is an idea that has come of age. In recent years, a diverse range of countries and jurisdictions have adopted these norms, which involve granting legal rights to nature or natural objects, such as rivers, forests, or ecosystems. This book critically examines the idea of natural objects as right-holders, and analyses legal cases, policies, and philosophical issues relating to this development. -/- Drawing on contributions from a range of experts in the field, (...) class='Hi'>Rights of Nature: A Re-examination investigates the potential for this innovative idea to revolutionize the concepts of rights, standing, and recognition as traditionally understood in many legal systems. Taking as its starting point Stone’s influential 1972 article ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’, the book examines the progress rights of nature have made since that time, by identifying central themes, unifying principles, and key distinctions in how rights of nature discourse has been operationalized in the disciplines of law, philosophy, and the social sciences. These themes and principles are illustrated through a wide variety of examples, including ecosystem services, indigenous thinking, and ecological restoration, demonstrating how the relationship between humanity and the natural world may be transforming. -/- Taking a philosophical, political, and legal perspective, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental law and policy, environmental ethics, and philosophy. (shrink)

I argue that Robert Nozick, in his well-known book “Anarchy, State, Utopia”, is working with Locke’s notion of the natural right to property merely instrumentally. I use the term “instrumentally” in the sense that the pieces of the source are not used within the context of the original work but are used atomically to support one’s argument or theory. Instrumental use of Locke’s theory causes incoherence in his theory. This paper introduces the incoherence in the question and explains how this (...) incoherency is inherent to Nozick’s interpretation and usage of Lockean Proviso. (shrink)

Hailing from the American South, I was a slow student, awakened by Plato in high school and introduced to philosophy in college. Alienated from analytic trivia and minutia, I did graduate work in Greek philosophy at Syracuse University. My first academic job at Memphis State University involved me in the Southern Civil Rights Movement; my second at the Wisconsin State University-Stevens Point involved me in the environmental movement and inspired me to create first environmental ethics and then, in collaboration (...) with Roger Ames, comparative environmental philosophy. In the face of unprecedented challenges, such as global climate change, academic philosophy must abandon its preoccupation with arcane puzzles and its studied intellectual isolation and work collaboratively with the natural and social sciences if it is to survive in the competitive and accountable academic climate of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

In recent years, policy debates in the United States have focused heavily on rising healthcare costs and what measures can be taken to ensure greater provision of healthcare to individuals of limited means. Much of the rhetoric on this subject has taken on an explicitly moral character, and one common sentiment is that healthcare is or should be viewed as a basic human right. However, the notion of a right to healthcare has not been well articulated, and critics have failed (...) to distinguish between legal and moral rights. Additionally, there are numerous problems inherent to viewing healthcare as a basic human right-many of which are in direct conflict with distinctly American conceptualizations of rights. The present paper reviews the debate over “rights”-both legal and natural-to healthcare, and argues that problems associated with natural rights arguments render them severely compromised. Instead, market systems commonly accepted in American society may be better suited to reducing healthcare costs and increasing access to services in the United States. (shrink)

It is often claimed that states enjoy, as a consequence of their sovereign status, the right to control the passage of outsiders through their territory and that they have a discretion to admit or to refuse to admit outsiders, whether those outsiders be tourists, business travelers, would-be economic migrants, or even refugees. Or, to be more exact, such limitations on that right to control are derived from the agreement of states to treaties and conventions, agreement which they could have withheld (...) and could yet revoke. As a statement of the legal position this is not completely uncontroversial,1 but my aim in this paper is not to make a contribution to international law or law at all. Rather, my concern is with political philosophy and with the issue of whether.. (shrink)

This paper addresses whether the often-bemoaned loss of unity of knowledge about humans, which results from the disciplinary fragmentation of science, is something to be overcome. The fragmentation of being human rests on a couple of distinctions, such as the nature-culture divide. Since antiquity the distinction between nature (roughly, what we inherit biologically) and culture (roughly, what is acquired by social interaction) has been a commonplace in science and society. Recently, the nature/culture divide has come under attack (...) in various ways, in philosophy as well as in cultural anthropology. Regarding the latter, for instance, the divide was quintessential in its beginnings as an academic dis-cipline, when Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the first professional anthropologists in the US, rallied for (what I call) the right to ignore—in his case, human nature—by adopting a separationist epistemic stance. A separationist stance will be understood as an epistemic research heuristic that defends the right to ignore a specif-ic phenomenon (e.g., human nature) or a specific causal factor in an explanation typical for a disciplinary field. I will use Kroeber’s case as an example for making a general point against a bias towards integration (synthesis bias, as I call it) that is exemplified, for instance, by defenders of evolutionary psychology. I will claim that, in principle, a separationist stance is as good as an integrationist stance since both can be equally fruitful. With this argument from fruitful sepa-ration in place, not just the separationist stance but also the nature/culture di-vide can be defended against its critics. (shrink)

This paper explores the alleged role of a conception of human nature for Kant’s justification of the duty to leave the state of nature and the related right to coerce others to enter the civil condition in the Doctrine of Right (1797). I criticise the interpretation put forward by Byrd and Hruschka, according to which Kant’s postulate of public right is a preventive measure based on a “presumption of badness” of human beings. Although this reading seems to be (...) supported by § 42 of the Doctrine of Right, I shall argue that the paragraph neither offers a justification of why we have a duty to leave the state of nature, nor explains why individuals are allowed to coerce others to do so. I offer an alternative interpretation of § 42 by focusing on the difference between formal and material violations of right and argue that the rationale behind the postulate of public right is the idea that remaining in the state of nature is a formal violation of the concept of right. It is therefore not prudential reason that authorizes us to coerce others to enter the lawful condition. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Lockean Argument for the Right to Liberty Our Rational Moral Competence From Liberty to Lockean Contractarianism.

In this paper, I would like to argue that brain-dead small children have a natural right not to be invaded by other people even if their organs can save the lives of other suffering patients. My basic idea is that growing human beings have the right to grow in the form of wholeness, and dying human beings also have the right to die in the form of wholeness; in other words, they have the right to be protected from outside invasion, (...) unless they have declared their wish to abandon that right beforehand. I call this the principle of wholeness. Natural rights, which were discussed by Hobbes and Locke in the 17th century, have to be extended to include the right to grow and die in the form of wholeness in the age of scientific civilization, where peripheral human lives are being threatened by aggressive biomedicine and other advanced technologies. (shrink)

The emergence of private property is an inflexion point in the hypothetical history conceived by Rousseau. Social relations, recently constituted, are completely restructured by this event. More specifically, it is only due to the accentuated economic inequality that stems from the partition of land between proprietors and supernumeraries that an exacerbated conflict arises between men, thus demanding the celebration of a contract able to stabilize social interactions via the erection of a sovereign political power. Given the importance of the matter, (...) Rousseau must address the issue of property also from a moral and normative standpoint. According to the Genevan, would it be possible to admit a pre-political regulation of property? Would there be some criteria to legitimate private property prior to civil state and positive right? Could actual possession be claimed as a right already in the state of nature? The present article aims to answer these questions by means of a dialogue between Rousseau and John Locke, the most influent thinker of natural right tradition in regard to this matter. (shrink)

The right to resist and the right to rebel have again become relevant as legal problems. Their justifications traditionally derive from natural law, human rights, the principle of the lesser evil or of the social contract. Interpretation of the right to resist expresses the tendencies to the law of people, in particular, the right to self-determination, distinguishing national and international understanding, and underscores the special nature of such right. Also, two-level research of the right to resist should be (...) distinguished research of the right to resist – the first is a debate about the nature character and legislative consolidation of this right, partly focused on preventive-limiting its properties, whereas the second one is updated at the time of social upheaval and legal concerns, and it contains not only the evaluation of the events, but sometimes attempts to justify ex post risk of abuse and original post-legitimation of public authorities. An important condition for the existence of the right to resistance is a legitimate aim. This could be called the internal condition, which is provided by those who implement this right. Other condition (which can be called external) and the base of implementation should recognize certain actions, acts or decisions by public authorities – those that violate human rights are illegal and unfair. At the same time, the purpose and result of the right to resistance may be changes in the public authorities, the termination of abuse of authority and violation of human rights by its agents, return to democratic legal regime or change in the constitutional system, aimed at creating a state of law, as well as in some cases, when combined with the right to self-determination, – the achievement of independence. The author of the present paper considers that the right to resist is an individual right, a human right. The author inclines to the idea of the collective nature of the right to resist implementation, but warns against simply counting the number of persons engaged in it. In other words, it does not matter how many people commit acts, but it does matter how many people support them. Considering the modalities of implementing the right to resist, it should be noted that these forms can be active or passive, expressed in actions directly or indirectly. The right of rebellion is an extreme form of the right to resist, which is carried out in case if the non-violent means of resistance are exhausted or proved ineffective. The conditions (and bases) of the right of rebellion are phenomena, such as the following: (1) massive human rights violations by public authorities (quantitative criterion); (2) systematic human rights violations by public authorities (accumulating criterion); or (3) extraordinary human rights violations by public authorities (criterion by serious, explicit and violent nature of the violation). Ambiguous is an issue of the limits of the right of rebellion, its permission and proportion, as well as whether it is possible to develop a mechanism for exercising this right. (shrink)

Discussions concerning whether there is a natural right to health care may occur in various forms, resulting in policy recommendations for how to implement any such right in a given society. But health care policies may be judged by international standards including the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The rights enumerated in the UDHR are grounded in traditions of moral theory, a philosophical analysis of which is necessary in order to adjudicate the value of specific policies designed (...) to enshrine rights such as a right to health care. We begin with an overview of the drafting of the UDHR and highlight the primary influence of natural law theory in validating the rights contained therein. We then provide an explication of natural law theory by reference to the writings of Thomas Aquinas, as well as elucidate the complementary “capabilities approach” of Martha Nussbaum. We conclude that a right to health care ought to be guaranteed by the state. (shrink)

Businesses increasingly rely on algorithms that are data-trained sets of decision rules (i.e., the output of the processes often called “machine learning”) and implement decisions with little or no human intermediation. In this article, we provide a philosophical foundation for the claim that algorithmic decision-making gives rise to a “right to explanation.” It is often said that, in the digital era, informed consent is dead. This negative view originates from a rigid understanding that presumes informed consent is a static and (...) complete transaction. Such a view is insufficient, especially when data are used in a secondary, noncontextual, and unpredictable manner—which is the inescapable nature of advanced artificial intelligence systems. We submit that an alternative view of informed consent—as an assurance of trust for incomplete transactions—allows for an understanding of why the rationale of informed consent already entails a right to ex post explanation. (shrink)

The vast majority of philosophers and legal theorists who have thought about the issue agree that there is such a thing as a moral right to privacy. However, there is little or no theoretical consensus about the nature of this right. According to reductionists, the right to privacy amounts to nothing more than a cluster of property rights and rights over the person, and therefore plays no autonomous explanatory role in moral theory (Thomson 1975, Davis 1959). Among (...) non-reductionists, there are almost as many accounts of the right to privacy as there are synagogues in the old town of Jerusalem. For one group of non-reductionists (perhaps the majority), the right to privacy is properly understood as a right of control, a form of autonomy. Within this group, some think that the right to privacy is the right to control information about oneself (Westin 1967, Beardsley 1971, Gerstein 1978, Fried 1970, Moore 2003), while others insist that it is the right to control access to oneself (Parker 1974, Scanlon 1975, Rachels 1975, Reiman 1976, Van den Haag 1971). For another group of non-reductionists, the right to privacy is the right to cognitive and/or physical inaccessibility (Gavison 1980, Garrett 1974, Allen 1988). Though these are by far the most widely adopted non-reductionist accounts of the relevant right, they are by no means the only ones currently on offer. There are hybrid accounts according to which the right to privacy is a cluster of various rights of control (Inness 1992) or a cluster of various rights of control and restricted access (DeCew 1997). And according to an influential “information-based” account, the right to privacy 1 is defined as the right that others not possess undocumented personal information about the right-holder (Parent 1983a; 1983b). The purpose of this paper is to bring some order to this theoretical chaos. On my view, none of these accounts of the right to privacy is accurate.. (shrink)

Thomas Hurka derives rights to punish from what I will term the Libertarian Rights Principle, which is “that there is really only one natural right, namely the equal right of all persons to the most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for other persons, and that all other natural rights are species or instances of the right to liberty.” These rights to punish, he says, extend only to punishing violators of rights, never to “punishing” (...) the innocent; extend only to punishing for violations pursuant to intentions publicly announced prior to these violations; are subject to the “upper limit qualification” that a permissible punishment for the violation of a right cannot be an act that would violate a more important right ; and are subject to the “minimum necessary qualification” that a punishment p for violating a right r is not permissible if a punishment p' that would, were it permitted, violate a less important right than would p, would protect r as effectively as would p. (shrink)

This article places the concept of "right to know," which is normally associated with law, in a moral framework. It outlines multiple meanings of the concept, emphasizing the institutional nature of "right to know." Then the article imbeds this understanding in moral thinking, including a discussion of the moral elements of rights, and applies that understanding in specific journalistic situations.

Call the conventionalist challenge to natural rights theory the claim that natural rights theory fails to capture the fact that moral rights are shaped by social and legal convention. While the conventionalist challenge is a natural concern, it is less than clear what this challenge amounts to. This paper aims to develop a clear formulation strong enough to put pressure on the natural rights theorist and precise enough to clarify what an adequate response would require.

There is an apparent ambiguity in Thomas Hobbes’s account in Leviathan1 of the source of the sovereign’s right to punish. Hobbes appears to both claim and deny that the prospective sovereign is granted the right to punish by prospective subjects. In claiming that the sovereign is granted the right to punish, we understand Hobbes to hold that the acquisition of the right follows from authorization—a process by which a representative is commissioned to act on the behalf of another person. In (...) denying that the sovereign is granted the right to punish, we understand Hobbes to hold that the possession of the right is merely the product of the mass relinquishment of natural rights; the prospective sovereign alone does .. (shrink)

This article considers whether any interpretation of the idea of equal claims to the natural world can resolve the Canyon Dilemma (i.e. can justify protecting the Grand Canyon but not a small canyon from mining by a poor generation). It first considers and ultimately rejects the idea of subjecting natural resource rights to an intergenerational equal division. It then demonstrates that a pluralist theory of environmental justice committed to both respect for the separateness of persons and to the collective (...) good can justify a type of intergenerational non-absolute equal division of natural resource rights that can navigate the Canyon Dilemma. (shrink)

Readers of Hannah Arendt’s now classic formulation of the statelessness problem in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism abound at a moment when the number of stateless peoples worldwide continues to rise exponentially. Along with statelessness, few concepts in Arendt scholarship have spawned such a volume of literature, and perhaps none have provoked as much interest outside of the field of philosophy, as ‘the right to have rights.’ Interpreting this enigmatic term exposes the heart of our beliefs about (...) the nature of the political and has important consequences for how we practice politics on a global scale because it implicitly takes plural human beings, and not the citizen, as its subjects. Arendt’s conceptualization of this problem remains unsurpassed in its diagnosis of the political situation of statelessness, as well as its intimate description of the human cost of what she refers to as ‘world loss,’ a phenomenon that the prevailing human rights and global justice discourse does not take into account. And yet, as an alternative framework for thinking about global politics, the right to have rights resists easy interpretation, let alone practical application. (shrink)

The beginning of the typical Miranda warning—“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law”—is also a fair statement of the medieval right to silence that can be deduced from the canonical rules of due process, and such a warning could and should have been given to arrestees in inquisitorial proceedings. In such proceedings the judge was obliged to give any detained or summoned person a precise statement of the (...) charged crime, to explain the nature of the charges, to allow or provide counsel and other defenses, and to prove that the person was considered guilty of the crime by respectable members of the community before insisting on a response to the charges or to any questioning. If the judge ignored these preliminary procedures and proceeded to interrogation, and persisted even after protest, the defendant could refuse to cooperate by declaring himself or herself aggrieved and entering an immediate appeal. (shrink)

Ben Bryan argues that the strongest challenge to natural rights theory is to explain how it overcomes the Problem of Authority. Given that our natural rights are multiply realisable by a range of equally reasonable social conventions, how or why ought one particular realisation have authority? I argue that Thomistic and Kantian solutions to this problem do not count as solutions from natural rights theory, and therefore offer my own solution. When theories of natural rights describe (...) the rights we have in terms that refer not only to moralised act-types, but rather, tell us which non-moralised act-types ought to be moralised in the relevant way, they avoid the Problem of Authority altogether. Such theories of natural rights are singularly realisable at the level of regulative conventional rules, and only multiply realisable at the level of constitutive conventional rules. The latter form of multiple realisability does not raise the Problem of Authority. (shrink)

This paper discusses the juridical interpretation of Hobbes’s state of nature argument, which has been defended by commentators such as Georg Geismann, Dieter Hüning or Peter Schröder. According to the juridical interpretation, the primary reason why the Hobbesian state of nature needs to be abandoned is not that everybody’s self-preservation is constantly threatened. It is that, due to the universal right to all things, the jural order of the state of nature includes some kind of logical contradiction. (...) The purpose of the paper is to show that the juridical interpretation does not do justice to Hobbes’s actual argument and that it starts from a false presupposition: being a Hohfeldian ‘liberty-right’, the right to all things can consistently be granted to all individuals at the same time. (shrink)

Foreword by Robert H. Bork -- Culture wars -- A distorted understanding of rights -- The right to privacy -- Griswold and contraception -- Roe and abortion -- Assisted suicide and homosexuality -- Political connections and natural consequences.

This article examines theories of ocean rights based on the works of Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf. Grotius's object‐centred view uses features of the natural world to justify claims to external objects. I show that Grotius's view is inadequate, because it relies on an outdated claim that oceanic resources are sufficiently abundant for anybody to use. Further, adaptations of his view are wanting, because they either rely on arbitrary distinctions or disregard the values of cultural minorities. Pufendorf's relational (...) view constructs rights through the exercise of human will. While Pufendorf believes that agreements create rights, he also argues that property rights can be unilaterally acquired from the commons without express consent from others. The relational view is a viable alternative to the object‐centred view, because it both delimits territorial claims over the ocean to a ‘modest’ size and also respects cultural variability. A major aim of this article is to present Pufendorf's theory of territorial rights extended over oceans and to demonstrate how it is useful for assessing contemporary disputes. In the final sections, I apply the relational view to Canadian claims to the Northwest Passage, and I also sketch implications for assessing expanding claims to the seabed. (shrink)

A number of moral philosophers and legal scholars have now recognized that we possess a natural, or moral, right to mental autonomy. This right is standardly characterized as our right against significant, nonconsensual interference with our minds. However, the precise scope of this right remains under-theorized: what makes some ways of influencing someone’s thinking—rational argumentation, say—permissible, but other ways—pharmacological manipulation—impermissible? Here I argue that the right to mental autonomy should be analyzed as the right to form attitudes in light of (...) reasons. Once understood this way, we can see how this right protects us against all “nonrational” interventions on our thinking—including, but not limited to, nonconsensual neurosurgery, pharmacological manipulations, science fiction mind control, subliminal messaging, and non-reason-giving advertising or nudging. Rather, the only fully permissible ways to seek to influence someone’s thinking are through methods that seek to engage their rational faculties. This result, I claim, accords with our moral intuitions concerning the matter. (shrink)

Ecosystem services are the benefits people obtain from ecosystems. Many of these services are provided outside the borders of the land where they are produced. This article investigates who is entitled to these non-excludable ecosystem services from a libertarian perspective. Taking a right-libertarian perspective, it is concluded that the beneficiaries generally hold the right to use non-excludable ecosystem services and the right to landowners not converting ecosystems. Landowners are only at liberty to convert ecosystems if they appropriated their land before (...) any beneficiary used the services and converted the ecosystems before or shortly after the beneficiaries started using the services. This means that the beneficiaries generally hold the right to compensation payments by the landowners in the event of service losses, instead of the landowners holding the right to payments for ecosystem services by the beneficiaries. Taking a left-libertarian perspective, it is concluded that landowners ought to pay for the non-excludable ecosystem services lost as a result of their activities as well as beneficiaries paying for the non-excludable ecosystem services they use. These payments are not made mutually, however, but to a central authority that distributes the returns to the community on an equal per capita basis. (shrink)

In an article in this journal, Christopher Cowley argues that we have ‘misunderstood the special nature of medicine, and have misunderstood the motivations of the conscientious objectors’. We have not. It is Cowley who has misunderstood the role of personal values in the profession of medicine. We argue that there should be better protections for patients from doctors' personal values and there should be more severe restrictions on the right to conscientious objection, particularly in relation to assisted dying. We (...) argue that eligible patients could be guaranteed access to medical services that are subject to conscientious objections by: removing a right to conscientious objection; selecting candidates into relevant medical specialities or general practice who do not have objections; demonopolizing the provision of these services away from the medical profession. (shrink)

One of the greatest woman intellectuals of eighteenth‐century Germany is Elise Reimarus, whose contribution to Enlightenment political theory is rarely acknowledged today. Unlike other social contract theorists, Reimarus rejects a people's right to violent resistance or revolution in her philosophical dialogue Freedom. Exploring the arguments in Freedom, this paper observes a number of similarities in the political thought of Elise Reimarus and Immanuel Kant. Both, I suggest, reject violence as an illegitimate response to perceived political injustice in a way that (...) opposes Locke's strong voluntarism and the absolutism of Hobbes. First, they emphasize the need to maintain the legal state as a precondition for the possibility of external right. Second, they share an optimistic view of the inherently “just” nature of the tripartite republican state. And finally, Reimarus and Kant both outline an alternative, nonviolent response to political injustice that consists in the freedom of public expression and a discourse on the moral enlightenment of man. (shrink)

People's “right to truth” or their “right to know” about their government's human rights abuses is a growing consensus in human rights discourses and a fertile area of work in international and humanitarian law. In most discussions of this right to know the truth, it is commonly seen as requiring the state or international institutions to provide access to evidence of the violations. In this paper, I argue that such a right naturally has many epistemic aspects, and the (...) tools of social epistemology can be helpful in elucidating what such a right entails. As a beginning for this project, I draw on those resources to argue that the right to know the truth is only meaningful if it includes a right to understand the abuses, and that such understanding can only come through the development of community epistemic capacities. Given this, I further argue that the state has a duty to support the development of these capacities, and that a critical place for beginning this process is in public schools. (shrink)

SummaryThe toleration gained by Protestant Dissenters, the Toleration Act of 1689, was far from comprehensive. It insisted that Dissenting authorities should subscribe to the doctrinal articles of the Church of England. It suspended anti-Dissent legislation rather than repealing it and the sacramental requirement for civil officials remained in place. The situation of Dissent under the law was ambiguous and, at least in theory, the freedom of worship gained under the act was incomplete. This article examines Dissenter attempts to clarify their (...) situation under the law and to be free from the Anglican subscription requirement for minsters, schoolmasters and tutors. It focuses on those aspects of their campaigning propaganda which accorded with natural law theory and particularly on the relationship between concerns for the well-being of the community and the assertion of the natural rights of conscience. It finds that pragmatic considerations competed with theoretical prescriptions. Although the language of natural rights was increasingly to the fore in the late eighteenth century, even the more radical Dissenters did not entirely abandon claims for wider toleration based on natural law considerations. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that natural rights trumped natural law. (shrink)

Hans Morten Haugen offers an analysis of the intersection of intellectual property with health, traditional knowledge and biodiversity against a backdrop of established and emerging human rights. How those rights interface and who decides are among the most difficult issues in international intellectual property, and there is no doubt that there is room for fresh ideas on how to simultaneously achieve the goals of innovation, development and access. 0Also part of series: Library of Human Rights; 2.

In this text I investigate the increasing usage of the Rights of Nature to approach the task of Stewardship for the Earth. The Ecuadorian constitution of 2008 introduces the indigenous concept of Pachamama and interpretes nature as a subject of rights. Reflecting the two 2017 cases of the Whanganui River and the Gangotri and Yamunotri Glaciers, my main argument is that, although the language of individual rights relies on modern subjectivity as well as the constitutionalism (...) of the secular nation state, it is obviously seen as a trans-cultural tool to justify Human Stewardship over the Earth in the Age of Anthropocene. I argue that the new Rights of Nature debate “provides” a straightforward justification of the Stewardship for the Earth and it includes two moments aimed to transcend European Modernity. The Rights Approach justifies obligations towards nature beyond human interests and it appeals to indigenous knowledge as an alternative sphere of argumentation. The relation of this endevor to the Anthropocene is twofold: The indigenous worldviews can now be translated into Rights of Nature because of the two core items of the Anthropocene that are gaining more and more acceptance: the idea of the Earth as a system and of history as a non-linear process. The scientific description of the Earth system offered by the Anthropocene supports holistic narratives of the Rights of Nature and facilitates the recognition of non-Western worldviews. At the same time the Rights of Nature help to clarify the normative claims implicit in the Anthropocene because the integrity of natural items and processes is presented as the explicit reason for a responsible human stewardship towards the Earth. (shrink)

Over the years a number of countries have abolished anonymous gamete donation and shifted toward open-identity policies. Donor-conceived children are said to have a fundamental “right to know” the identity of their donor. In this article, we trace the arguments that underlie this claim and question its implications. We argue that, given the status attributed to the right to know one's gamete donor, it would be discriminatory not to extend this right to naturally conceived children with misattributed paternity. One way (...) to facilitate this would be through routine paternity testing at birth. While this proposal is likely to raise concerns about the conflicting interests and rights of other people involved, we show that similar concerns apply to the context of open-identity gamete donation. Unless one can identify a rational basis for treating the two groups differently, one's stance toward both cases should be the same. (shrink)

The shortcomings of existing legal tools to abate species extinctions and habitat losses raise the attractiveness of recognizing rights of nature (RoN), in effect granting legal standing directly to non-human entities and collectives. RoN have been recognized in several domestic legislations and attract increasing popularity and enthusiasm. Yet, from an analytical and general perspective RoN rely on a contentious relation between concepts such as intrinsic value and interests, respectively, as justifying RoN. Consequently, a general analytical defense of RoN (...) has not been provided and recognition hitherto has been constrained to the contingent factors of domestic legislations. Here, I will provide an examination of RoN by way of expressive theories of law where law expresses (some) ethical values. Expressive theories of law have not previously been related to RoN. I will examine whether such theories have the potential of defending RoN as rights that legislatures have strong general reasons to recognize. The examination of RoN through the lens of expressivist legal theories provide a better understanding of RoN, and the analytical and conceptual commitments they presuppose, including the relation between ethics and law and the values underpinning RoN to be expressed by law. (shrink)

Recently a child’s right to a father was invoked to justify the prevention of single women from obtaining access to IVF. This article explores the conceptual and normative issues about the nature of the right and its conflict with a woman’s right to procreative autonomy. The discussion relates the conceptual issues to those raised in the context of ‘wrongful life’ tort cases. It concludes that the right to be born with a father, although conceptually sound, does not justify the (...) restriction on the procreative right of single women. (shrink)

This paper examines the rights of nature (RoN) as a product of religious beliefs and how the increasing abandonment of religious beliefs in Europe could impact the development of RoN on the continent. As a concept rooted in religious and Indigenous peoples’ practices, this article argues that there are no religious and Indigenous peoples’ ideologies in Europe upon which RoN of nature could be anchored. Furthermore, since hardly any groups in Europe identify as Indigenous peoples in the (...) strict sense of the term, except some groups in Scandinavia, RoN in Europe cannot be effective as there is no special attachment of most Europeans to natural entities. To achieve this argument, the Enlightenment period is pointed out as the starting point for the abandonment of religion in Europe. Because of this, the article contends that the recent law on RoN for Mar Menor in Spain may fail as it is not rooted in religious philosophies. To transplant RoN to Europe and for it to be effective, a new religion with spiritual traditions and insights consistent with the worldview of RoN would have to be developed. However, for such a view to be protected under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, it must “attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion, and importance.” It is not certain if RoN has attained such a threshold in Europe or will ever attain it. Using the Białowieża Forest case, the paper concludes that nature already has adequate protection in the current legal system in Europe, and it is not necessary for the European Union to adopt RoN. (shrink)