Rival doctrines : the politics of human rights

Anna Yeatman

    Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

    2 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Citizenship is obviously a political and statist discourse. However, the same cannot be said of human rights. The predominant conception of human rights at this time appears to be one that is moral rather than political, cosmopolitan rather than statist, and indeed antistatist, so far as it conceives of sovereignty either as a means to realize a transcendental moral end, or opposes the idea of sovereignty as such. Yet is this conception of human rights the only one on offer? I think it is evident from the historical and practical development of human rights as a state-centered and interstate discourse of political jurisprudence that it is not. Here I wish to offer an account of the state-centered and interstate discourse of human rights, and to propose that, of these two doctrines of human rights, it is the only defensible one. In what follows, I have two objects. The first is to insist that there are two rival and mutually exclusive doctrines of rights. The rivalry between them constitutes the politics of human rights. 1 I seek to relativize the first doctrine of human rights as I restate the case for the second doctrine. In such insistence, I want to call to account Samuel Moyn’s history of human rights that makes it seem that the first doctrine is “the” doctrine of human rights, the implication of which is that if we find reason to reject this doctrine, then we have to evacuate the rhetorical domain of rights tout court. The second is to restate the civil philosophical conception of human rights with sufficient clarity as to at least cause those who have conflated human rights with the first doctrine to think again, and to be aware of what is at stake.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationThe Aporia of Rights: Explorations in Citizenship in the Era of Human Rights
    EditorsAnna Yeatman, Peg Birmingham
    Place of PublicationU.S.
    PublisherBloomsbury
    Pages205-226
    Number of pages22
    ISBN (Electronic)9781623568764
    ISBN (Print)9781623569778
    Publication statusPublished - 2014

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