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5 - Rights theory for global ethics

Heather Widdows
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
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Summary

INTRODUCTION

Chapters 3 and 4 introduced the main moral and political theories that form the basis of the global-ethics toolbox. To these can be added additional theories and perspectives, for instance, legal theory, social theory, cultural critiques and, perhaps most importantly, empirical evidence from policy and practice and hands-on experience. Your ethical toolbox grows as you learn and experience more and continue to add theories and knowledge of how such theories play out in practice. In this chapter we shall add one final theory to it: rights theory. Over the past half-century, talk about human rights has gradually grown until it is familiar in all forums of debate: academic, policy and practice. In addition, rights are very familiar in popular discourse about ethics and politics: as O'Neill (2008) comments, the “rhetoric of human rights is all around us – perhaps never more so than at present in the English-speaking world”. Other examples can be found easily in newspapers and popular media, for instance when people talk about their rights being violated, even when there appears to be no specific human right being directly violated; an example of this we consider in this chapter is whether being subject to excessive noise could constitute a violation of human rights.

The wide application and acceptance of rights makes them of crucial importance in developing global ethics, because human rights are the most obvious candidate to be considered a global ethic in the current system of global governance.

Type
Chapter
Information
Global Ethics
An Introduction
, pp. 98 - 129
Publisher: Acumen Publishing
Print publication year: 2011

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