This essay engages the issues regarding the foundation and justification of human rights by bringing three representative thinkers into critical conversation with each other regarding these issues. John Paul II (1920-2005), Michael Ignatieff (1947-), and Richard Rorty (1931-2007) each support the moral superiority of the culture of human rights, but they are seriously divided on whether or not these rights need justification and, if so, how.

Ignatieff; these are universalism, enforceability, differentiation, and the relationship between nationalism and human rights. Through an examination of Ignatieff's responses this essay will show why it is reasonable to claim that he does not truly address them, but rather he accepts them as unsolvable, and offers justification for negating their relevance. This essay will then show through a study of Beitz's reaction to the scepticisms of international human rights, that his two-level model, which takes a reductionist approach, allows him to respond to the problems, without really providing the answers Ignatieff requires. Ignatieff's

Political Studies Review, 2012

Changing Societies & Personalities, 2019

Global Justice : Theory Practice Rhetoric, 2020

2016

'Now architect, now archaeologist, now a man whose hand is in the past. Somebody is made to face the changes; somebody is built to last. What do you know, still living so young? Tomorrow is no burden; time can be overcome.' -The Constantines, "Time Can Be Overcome" I am a human being. You are a human being. We are human. These simple propositions have become ethical claims of the highest order. They express expectations of recognition, concern and equality. Those expectations take social form as rights: rights that protect us from torture, from arbitrary imprisonment, from hunger and deprivation, which entitle us to standing within our communities, participation in politics, productive work, engagement in cultural life, privacy sufficient to live without undue interference and many other protections and privileges. In promising these protections and privileges human rights redefine political relationships by altering how we see ourselves and how we share our lives with others. Human rights are a transformative political idea, although one that many of us now take for granted. Yet, if we take the ethical value of human rights seriously then we need to recognise the profound claims they make along with the radical social changes they demand. Human rights assert that everyone (whether alone or in community with others) counts for something; that we are owed respect and voice whomever we are, irrespective of existing hierarchies of protection and privilege; and they assert that political authority is only legitimate when everyone counts. These profound claims force us to reconsider the known coordinates of social justice and in doing so upsets the given order. Human rights are disruptive.

Human rights have become a wider and more visible feature of our political discourse, yet many have also noted the great discrepancy between the human rights invoked in this discourse and traditional philosophical accounts that conceive of human rights as natural rights. This article explores an alternative approach in which human rights are conceived primarily as international norms aimed at securing the basic conditions of membership or inclusion in a political society. Central to this 'political conception' of human rights is the idea of human rights as special (in contrast to general) rights that individuals possess in virtue of specific associative relations they stand in to one another. This view is explored and defended through a critical review of four recent political conceptions -Michael Ignatieff, John Rawls, Thomas Pogge and Joshua Cohen.

2022

Human rights have made mass murder and genocide more, rather than less, likely. A previous version of this paper appears as chapter 3 of my Patriotic Elaborations: Essays in Practical Philosophy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009).

Perspectives on Politics, 2016