Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 88-89). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (D.C.L.). / Written for the Institute of Comparative Law. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2009/08/31). Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis concerns the various concepts of rights and philosophical accounts of them. Chapter 1 addresses some methodological issues affecting analytic legal philosophy and the philosophy of rights. Chapter 2 distinguishes between two kinds of philosophical accounts of rights: models and theories. Models outline the 'conceptually basic' types of rights, their differences, and their relationships with other kinds of 'normative positions' (e.g., duties, liabilities, etc.). Theories of rights serve two roles: first, to posit a supposed ultimate purpose for all rights; second, to provide criteria for determining what counts as 'a right' in the first place. The chapter also criticises both monistic models (ones positing only a single basic kind) for being under-inclusive and a subset of pluralistic ones (those positing several basic kinds) as over-inclusive. Chapter 3 clarifies the concepts of rights exercise, enforcement, remedying, and vindication. Chapter 4 explains the Interest-Will Theories of rights debate, while Chapter 5 argues that its constituents are irredeemably flawed, unnecessary, and under-inclusive. Chapter 6 further analyses the concept of rights enforceability, showing why legal rights are not invariably enforceable by legal powers. It then explains why wholly unenforceable legal rights nonetheless constitute 'imperfect' or defective cases. Chapter 7 argues there are more ways to enforce legal rights than just via powers, elucidating two such modes: legal rights can generally be claimed or invoked using legal liberties in private and social circumstances. While Chapter 8 shows why it might not always be possible to make liberty-based claims or invocations of right, it also provides reasons for thinking that legal rights that cannot be enforced in these ways are also imperfect.

This dissertation focuses on the concept of human rights, and in particular on how we should understand the interests protected by human rights and human rights' correlative duties. The work consists of three papers. Human rights and interests In the first paper I consider which conditions interests have to satisfy in order to be protected by human rights. I call these the Interest Conditions. I argue that we need to distinguish between two kinds of Interest Conditions: qualitative and quantitative ones. This means that we need to consider both which type of interests, and how much of these interests, human rights protect. I then consider the content of these conditions. Political accounts and fidelity to human rights practice In recent years, considerable attention has been received by so called "political accounts" of the analysis of human rights. According to these theories, one of the distinctive features of human rights is that they play a certain political function. In particular, a large number of political accounts hold that human rights have political correlative duties. I call this thesis 'Political Duties'. Political Duties has been defended on the grounds of the desideratum of fidelity, according to which the analysis of human rights ought to be faithful to human rights practice. I consider two ways of interpreting this desideratum and the corresponding versions of the argument in support of Political Duties. I argue that neither version successfully supports the thesis. The universal scope of positive duties correlative to human rights In the third paper I focus on duties correlative to human rights. We can distinguish between two different kinds of duties: negative and positive ones. Negative duties are duties not to perform an action, while positive duties are duties to perform an action. I focus on the latter and, in particular, I concentrate on the question of their scope - that is, on understanding who holds them. I defend a refinement of the thesis that all individuals hold positive duties correlative to human rights, which I call the Universal Scope Thesis.

The concept of human rights holds a distinctive significance in political practice, yet philosophers remain divided over the nature of these rights. The Orthodox View defines human rights as moral rights possessed by all individuals simply in virtue of their humanity. Proponents of this view claim that the contemporary idea of human rights is a continuation of the natural rights project of the eighteenth century and shares many of its basic philosophical assumptions. This thesis argues that the Orthodox View is no longer an appropriate characterisation of the concept of human rights we find in current domestic and international practice. It also rejects recent alternatives offered by supporters of the Political View, who define human rights by particular functions they serve, specifically their role(s) in acting as benchmarks for the legitimacy of states or triggers of international concern. I propose instead a new 'Political Justification View' of human rights, which states that human rights are demands which challenge unjustifiable political-institutional orders, which are the concern of all people, and which protect the equal standing of individuals in political decisions that affect the collective or individual good. This view better captures the diversity of practices that employ the term 'human rights', whilst also explaining its innovative power as a moral language that enables individuals to challenge the official institutional order under whose authority they live. Finally, I argue that within this broader view of human rights there are two distinct moral concepts which pertain to different parts of human rights practice: Domestic Human Rights and International Legitimacy Rights. Separating these two concepts is helpful in resolving long-standing debates about whether human rights are properly thought of as minimalist moral concerns of legitimacy or broader social goals to be achieved through political institutions.

This paper is a case study on Bradley E. Manning, famous for leaking classified intelligence to media, or in the charge sheet’s words: “knowingly give intelligence to the enemy, through indirect means.” My opinion is that this sort of dilemma is a question of values, how you view the world and, most important of all, human rights and the philosophy of rights. Therefore I decided to sort out the arguments regarding the issue of freedom of speech versus the state’s need for protection. To do this I performed a pro et contra analysis from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, this building my theory on which I lean my other work upon. Furthermore, I performed a case study on Manning where I compared the charges and the defense with the arguments of Mill and Hobbes. Ergo: I applied my theory on an existing conflict between freedom of speech and the state’s need for protection to see which arguments that are used in the charge against Manning and if one could derive this from the argumentation analysis consistent of Mill and Hobbes.   Words: 11474

Ich habe im Jahr 2016 eine Studie durchgeführt, in deren Rahmen der Begriff des Speziesismus expliziert und operationalisiert wurde. Über vier verschiedene Erhebungsmethoden wurden Personen hinsichtlich ihrer Einstellung gegenüber Tieren befragt. Die erhobenen Daten waren Grundlage für eine statistische Prüfung der Reliabilität und Validität des zuvor definierten Konzepts. Die Definition „speziesistischer Einstellungen“ wird im nächsten Abschnitt vorgetragen, anschließend wird im dritten Abschnitt dieser Arbeit die Operationalisierung erläutert. Im vierten Abschnitt werden die Erhebungsmethoden und die erhaltene Stichprobe beschrieben. Der fünfte Abschnitt der Arbeit präsentiert die statistischen Auswertungen. Er ist nochmal in drei Unterabschnitte unterteilt. Zuerst wird die Bildung des Speziesismus-Index erläutert und auf die Verteilung dieses Index eingegangen. Anschließend befassen wir uns ausführlich mit der Reliabilität und Validität des Index. Im dritten Unterabschnitt der empirischen Auswertungen wird schließlich noch auf die theoretische Fruchtbarkeit des Konzepts eingegangen. Der sechste Abschnitt fasst die Arbeit zusammen und gibt einen Ausblick für die weitere empirische Forschung zum Thema Speziesismus.:1. Einleitung; 2. Defintion Speziesismus 3. Operationalisierung 4. Erhebungsmethoden und Sample 5. Empirische Auswertungen 6. Zusammenfassung

Despite its prominence as a pejorative term in moral and political philosophy, the phenomenon of ethnocentrism has escaped the focused attention of moral and political philosophers. Little sustained effort has been devoted to its in-depth analysis. This thesis attempts to fill in that gap in the philosophical literature, with a particular focus on the analysis of ethnocentrism as a problem, or rather a set of problems, facing the theory and practice of human rights. The thesis begins by drawing a core distinction between ethnocentrism as a moral phenomenon (i.e., a form of moral partiality), on the one hand, and as an epistemological phenomenon (i.e., a mode of judgment), on the other. After singling out the epistemological aspect of ethnocentrism as its main focus, the thesis argues for four interlocking claims. The first claim is that ethnocentrism represents an unwarranted mode of judgment, and thus an epistemic hazard that ought to be avoided if at all possible (Chapter One, §3). This claim is defended at length against the version of political constructivism advanced by John Rawls, which, by grounding political argument exclusively in ideas and values embedded in a common public culture, implicitly justifies a form of ethnocentrism (Chapter Two). The second claim is that moral argument cannot avoid ethnocentrism by grounding itself, as some have thought, in judgments upon which there is broad moral consensus, or rather by avoiding any appeal to judgments that are the subject of marked dissensus (Chapter Three and Chapter Four). Thirdly, the thesis argues that ethnocentrism is, if avoidable, only so to a limited extent (Chapter Six, §2). And fourthly, it offers an outline of how this limited form of avoidance might work (Chapter Five and Chapter Six, §3).

May the state, from a liberal point of view, operate laws and institutions that impede the mobile lifestyle of nomadic Roma and Travellers, or should the state take steps to accommodate their nomadic way of life? This is the essence of the problem of Roma and Traveller itinerancy and the question that is at the heart of this three-partite dissertation. The first part of the dissertation looks at public policy in France and the United Kingdom and describes the six public policy problems that constitute the problem of Roma and Traveller itinerancy. These problems concern the education of children, the French travel permits system, the legal conditions for voter registration and for GP registration, the housing benefits system, and the public provision of halting sites. The second part looks at liberal political theory. It suggests that contemporary liberalism divides into two strands that take different views on the entitlements of cultural and religious minorities, and it provides a detailed outline of the prime articulations of each approach, namely the multiculturalist liberalism of Kymlicka and the classic neutrality liberalism of Barry. The third part investigates what the two said liberalisms imply for the six policy problems from part 1. These analyses suggest that the two liberalisms have slightly diverging implications for the halting sites problem, the housing benefits problem and the problem of GP registration. They suggest furthermore that the two accounts converge on the question of voter registration and agree that the voter registration system must accommodate nomads, and may not make the possession of a fixed residence an absolute condition for voter registration. And the analyses suggest finally that the two liberalisms also converge over the education question and the travel permits question, but here support polices that are potentially inimical to Roma and Traveller itinerancy. The broader implications of these findings are that liberalism is potentially, but not necessarily and not intrinsically, inimical to Roma and Traveller nomadism, and that the disagreement between classic neutrality liberalism and multiculturalist liberalism is weak insofar as public policy is concerned.

The liberal conception of the state is marked by an insistence upon the equal civil and political rights of each inhabitant. Recently, though, a number of writers have argued that this emphasis on uniform rights ignores the fact that the populations of most states are culturally diverse, and that their inhabitants have significant interests qua members of particular cultures. They argue that liberals should recognize special, group-based cultural rights as a necessary part of a theory of justice in multicultural societies. In this thesis I examine the idea of special cultural rights. In the first part (Chapters 1 to 4), I begin by setting out some of the different conceptions of culture and multiculturalism that are involved in the debate over cultural rights. I then discuss three claims made by supporters of special cultural rights: (1) that having culture is an essential part of individual autonomy; (2) that people have morally significant interests qua members of particular cultures; and (3) that these interests are inadequately protected by existing liberal conceptions of human rights. Although I conclude that (1) is correct, I argue that both (2) and (3) are mistaken. Among other things, I suggest that the version of culture relied upon by supporters of special cultural rights is an implausible one and I outline what I take to be a more plausible, cosmopolitan conception of culture. In the second part (Chapters 5 to 9), I begin by looking at specific instances of cultural rights-claims, and analyzing the concept of cultural rights qua rights. I consider the practical and conceptual difficulties with special cultural rights at great length. But the core of my thesis is that our interest in culture lies in its contribution of worthwhile goals and options, and that this interest lies in culture generally rather than in particular cultures. Hence, adopting a special or group-based distribution of any right to culture would seem to be inconsistent with liberal egalitarian principles. If there are such things as cultural rights, I argue, they are general rather than special rights. I conclude by offering a very preliminary account of what a cosmopolitan conception of cultural rights might involve in the case of the right to free association and language rights.