New Perspectives on Human Rights Justification

Abstract

In the recent literature on human rights, calls to reach beyond the debate between ‘moral’ and ‘political’ conceptions of human rights are becoming more pronounced and more frequent: according to some commentators, the two approaches have become ‘a case of ships passing in the night’ (A. Buchanan). To bridge the gap between moral reasoning and political practice, the combination of both approaches is a useful strategy. This panel explores the diversity of perspectives on the justification of human rights beyond the dichotomy ‘political vs moral'. Beyond possible overlaps in terms of the content or scope of concrete rights, how can such reconciliatory accounts proceed, on which resources would they draw, and can they provide a fertile starting point for the development of a full-fledged conception of human rights? At the same time, the panel aims to broaden the philosophical perspective on this matter by taking into account modes and strategies of justification not yet captured by the framework of the above debate. We invite contributions that develop novel approaches to explaining the normativity of human rights, including (but not limited to) reflexive, critical, anthropological, and relational approaches. We focus on the different ways that human rights are inscribed in conceptual relationships that concern, for example, the idea of social cooperation or the constitution of the modern political order. From this point of view, the justification of human rights is not a free-standing enterprise, but built-in in specific institutional configurations. Such accounts would temporalize the foundations of human rights without collapsing into a functionalist narrative of a global practice that neglects the variety of the social and political aspects of human rights.