Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-5g6vh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T11:23:51.888Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Liberal Justice: Kant, Rawls and Human Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2018

Onora O’Neill
Onora O’Neill*
Affiliation:
Cambridge University
*
Email: oon20@cam.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Kant’s practical philosophy, Rawls’s theory of justice and contemporary human rights thinking are landmarks in liberal discussions of justice. Each forms part of a powerful tradition of political thought, and although their substantive accounts of justice diverge at many points, they also overlap in substantial ways. This article focuses not on their substantive claims about justice, or about other ethical standards, but on their differing views of the questions to be addressed, on their proposed justifications for standards of justice, and on a limited range of questions about interpreting and institutionalizing those standards.

Keywords

KantRawlshuman rightsjusticeethicsjustification
Type
Articles
Information
Kantian Review , Volume 23 , Special Issue 4: Special Issue on Kant & Rawls , December 2018 , pp. 641 - 659
Copyright
© Kantian Review 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Descartes, René Descartes (1985) The Discourse on the Method in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Tr. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothof and Dugald Murdoch, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Etinson, Adam, ed. (2018) Human Rights: Moral or Political. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hopgood, Stephen (2013) The Endtimes of Human Rights. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Malcolm, Noel (2018) Human Rights and Political Wrongs: A New Approach to Human Rights Law. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Moyn, Samuel (2010) The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
O’Neill, Onora (2016) ‘Enactable and Enforceable: Kant’s Criteria for Right and Virtue’. Kant-Studien, 107(1), 111–125.Google Scholar
O’Neill, Onora (forthcoming) ‘Justice without Ethics: A Twentieth Century Innovation?’. In John Tasioulas (ed.), Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Posner, Eric (2014) The Twilight of Human Rights Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rawls, John (1999a) A Theory of Justice. Rev. edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rawls, John (1999b) The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Schneewind, J. B. (1993) ‘Kant and Natural Law Ethics’. Ethics, 104, 53–74.Google Scholar
Shue, Henry (1980) Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 2nd edn 1996.Google Scholar
United Nations (1966) Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%20999/volume-999-i-14668-english.pdf.Google Scholar
United Nations (1967) Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. https://treaties.un.org/doc/treaties/1976/01/19760103%2009-57%20pm/ch_iv_03.pdf.Google Scholar