Abstract: This thesis examines the foundations of individual human rights. The general thought that informs the discussion is that rights and values are two different kinds of moral discourse. Hence, any attempt to simply state rights in value terms will be problematic because the agent-relative character of values does not lend itself to grounding/ explaining interpersonal rules, like rights. The thesis outlines agent-relative values, showing their plausibility, and then proceeds to show how rights perform a different function. The attempt to move from talk about what is right to what rights we have is termed the ‘moralist fallacy’. Rights are kinds of restrictions that others face on their actions when they are promoting their own good. Axiology is about how best to achieve one’s objective agent-relative good; so values involve trade offs and calculations agents can perform about what is in their best interest, while rights are not open to trade offs and calculations because they are restrictions that agents face when they are pursuing their own good. The main problem the thesis discerns is how rights can be concerned with protecting the concerns of others when what people legitimately care about are their own concerns. Two different views of the motivational legitimacy of rights are examined—the agent well being view and the agent-recipient view. On the former, rights are motivationally appealing and justified because abiding by them can be shown to be part of what constitutes an agent’s (who is subject to abiding by rights) well being; on the latter view, abiding by rights constitutes part of the recipient’s (who has the rights) well being. Taken separately these two views are problematic. Rights legitimacy would seem to require something from both views. But since these views are contraries they do not seem open to combination either. The thesis will attempt to provide a solution to reconciling the agent well being and agent recipient views while trying to retain the nature of rights as restrictions not open to trade offs or reducible to value talk. Rights function as restrictions, but why do they function this way and how are they justified when what people are mostly concerned with is their own agent-relative good? Rights must be a separate kind of moral claim, not reducible to talk about what values we have in order for rights to have the motivational and justificatory strength they need for interpersonal validity and to resist paternalist interferences. Rights will have this strength if they are based on something that all value pursuers require—such as recognition of one’s legitimate claim to possess oneself. First possession based on first come, first serve will provide legitimacy for a system of rights because it will appeal to and motivate agents by relating rights-respect to their well being. I will argue that abiding by others’ rights is in one’s best interest because doing so is a wise choice—while one might believe that not abiding by others’ rights might give one the best outcome, one cannot be sure about this and so ought to choose to abide by rights as a general policy. Also, agents ought to make sure that they voice their concerns over rights violations of others. Even though this may not be to their immediate benefit, it is rational for agents to speak out on this issue and reinforce rights–respecting behaviour because making the system effective will ultimately be in their own long-term self-interest. The thesis also tries to make sense of how rights are compossible and when rights might face thresholds beyond which they no longer hold.

Abstract: This thesis examines the foundations of individual human rights. The general thought that informs the discussion is that rights and values are two different kinds of moral discourse. Hence, any attempt to simply state rights in value terms will be problematic because the agent-relative character of values does not lend itself to grounding/ explaining interpersonal rules, like rights. The thesis outlines agent-relative values, showing their plausibility, and then proceeds to show how rights perform a different function. The attempt to move from talk about what is right to what rights we have is termed the ‘moralist fallacy’. Rights are kinds of restrictions that others face on their actions when they are promoting their own good. Axiology is about how best to achieve one’s objective agent-relative good; so values involve trade offs and calculations agents can perform about what is in their best interest, while rights are not open to trade offs and calculations because they are restrictions that agents face when they are pursuing their own good. The main problem the thesis discerns is how rights can be concerned with protecting the concerns of others when what people legitimately care about are their own concerns. Two different views of the motivational legitimacy of rights are examined—the agent well being view and the agent-recipient view. On the former, rights are motivationally appealing and justified because abiding by them can be shown to be part of what constitutes an agent’s (who is subject to abiding by rights) well being; on the latter view, abiding by rights constitutes part of the recipient’s (who has the rights) well being. Taken separately these two views are problematic. Rights legitimacy would seem to require something from both views. But since these views are contraries they do not seem open to combination either. The thesis will attempt to provide a solution to reconciling the agent well being and agent recipient views while trying to retain the nature of rights as restrictions not open to trade offs or reducible to value talk. Rights function as restrictions, but why do they function this way and how are they justified when what people are mostly concerned with is their own agent-relative good? Rights must be a separate kind of moral claim, not reducible to talk about what values we have in order for rights to have the motivational and justificatory strength they need for interpersonal validity and to resist paternalist interferences. Rights will have this strength if they are based on something that all value pursuers require—such as recognition of one’s legitimate claim to possess oneself. First possession based on first come, first serve will provide legitimacy for a system of rights because it will appeal to and motivate agents by relating rights-respect to their well being. I will argue that abiding by others’ rights is in one’s best interest because doing so is a wise choice—while one might believe that not abiding by others’ rights might give one the best outcome, one cannot be sure about this and so ought to choose to abide by rights as a general policy. Also, agents ought to make sure that they voice their concerns over rights violations of others. Even though this may not be to their immediate benefit, it is rational for agents to speak out on this issue and reinforce rights–respecting behaviour because making the system effective will ultimately be in their own long-term self-interest. The thesis also tries to make sense of how rights are compossible and when rights might face thresholds beyond which they no longer hold.

Since Isaiah Berlin employed his now classic notion of value pluralism for the justification of liberalism, the correlation between the two ideas has long been presumed in the field of political theory during the second half of the twentieth century. However, this Berlinian assertion has aroused a significant amount of criticism in the past ten years. Many supporters of value pluralism argue that due to its ¡§incommensurability¡¨ presupposition, value pluralism not only cannot serve as the foundation of liberalism, it will also endanger the universal status of the latter, and hence produce irresolvable theoretical inconsistency. Instead of using value pluralism to justify liberalism, some theorists are convinced that different types of political projects can be induced from value pluralism. On the other hand, liberals who endorse value pluralism also try to fill the lacunae between Berlinian pluralism and liberalist doctrine. The purpose of this thesis is to summarize the scope of theoretical differences among value pluralists, explore the controversies surrounding value pluralism, and examine different political projects preferred by various value pluralists. Throughout the essay, the following questions will be answered: What are the theoretical implications of value pluralism? Does it contradict with liberalist doctrine? If not, what account of liberalism does it approve of? In short, this thesis tries to map out the theoretical development of value pluralism since Isaiah Berlin.

This thesis rejects the position, dominant in political philosophy since Plato that the authority of states may be explained by means of a moral theory of legitimacy. It denies that it is possible even in principle to determine a principle that can endow a state with the moral entitlement to rule and create for its citizens a moral obligation of obedience which thereby authorises it to coerce them. The thesis argues that a Lockean understanding of the state leads more naturally to the position that the state is properly understood as a necessary evil granted qualified justification to coerce in order to protect people from each other. It locates this ambiguity in the moral psychology of the individuals from which a Lockean state must derive its powers and through whom it acts. It further claims that, Government officials being no different in character than the individuals over whom they rule, further coercion may be justified to raise funds by taxation to set up political institutions such as a separation of powers, and to ensure that citizens may equip themselves with the skills needed to avoid being financially dependent on the state. This justification is nonetheless provisional, and the responsibility to weigh the necessity of public coercion against the evil that it involves falls upon individual voters as much as parliamentarians and prime ministers.

Thesis advisor: Nasser Behnegar / Political ideology can be described in terms of value pluralist theory. Much of the variation between political ideologies can be explained by the fact that the principles that are essential to society--liberty, equality, fraternity, peace, loyalty, and civilization--are incommensurable and often conflict forcing each person and community to emphasize some principles over others leading to an imperfect society. Each political ideology is a combination of interests and the selected balance of principles and thus can be essentially defined according to the level of preference for each of these six principles. This paper studies major political ideologies throughout the globe and develops a model for understanding them in these terms. This paper further argues for a pluralist democracy, with constantly shifting ideological dominance in a community as the next best thing to an impossible utopia and the only means of preventing the collapse of society due to a lack of essential principles. This model makes clear the fallacy of understanding political ideology in terms of "left" and "right," which not only oversimplify political ideology but also fundamentally misrepresent it. It also leads to narrowing visions of politics that prevent significant changes to a political system and undermine the possibility for pluralist democracy. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

The purpose of this thesis is to delineate Taylor¡¦s reasoning on the concept of freedom. I start by explicating Taylor¡¦s thesis of philosophical anthropology to illustrate how he answers the question: ¡§what is human agency?¡¨ Based on this ontological condition, Charles Taylor begins his discussion of the predicament of modern freedom by tracing the transformation of moral and epistemological ideals since the seventeenth century. By picturing the trajectories of moral sources in Western modernity, he believes, it enables us to meaningfully reflect upon personal freedom in an age of pluralism. Taylor demonstrates how the Enlightenment and Romanticism have jointly shape the background understanding of modern freedom. Based on his diagnosis of the ambivalent nature of modern freedom, Taylor contends classic liberalism for its universalist and atomist understanding of freedom. He proposes a ¡§complex liberalism¡¨ that recognizes the ¡§embededness¡¨ of freedom, on the one hand, and acknowledges the fact that the moral ideal of being free has its intrinsic worth, on the other hand. The ideal of freedom, therefore, must be understood as a distinctively modern phenomenon that is constitutive of modern self-identity, rather than a freestanding principle independent of any substantial conceptions of the good.

How does one lead a life of law, love and freedom? This inquiry has very deep roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Indeed, the divergent answers to this inquiry mark the transition from Judeo to Christian. This dissertation returns to those roots to trace the routes that these ideas have taken as they move from the sacred to the secular. The argument of this dissertation is threefold. First, it argues that the concepts of law, love and freedom are each internally polarized. Each concept contains, within itself, conflicting values. Paul's equivocation in his letters is a striking manifestation of this internal polarization. Second, it argues that, while values are many, my life is one. Hence, one needs to combine the plurality of values within a singular life. Values find their coherence within a form of life. There are, at least, two ways of leading a life of law, love and freedom: monastic versus antinomian. Third, it argues that the Reformation transformed these religious ideals into political ideologies. The monastic ideal is politically manifested as constitutionalism, and the antinomian ideal is politically manifested as anarchism. There are, at least, two ways of creating a polity of law, love and freedom: constitutional versus anarchic. To mount the threefold argument, the dissertation deploys a whole range of disciplinary tools. The dissertation draws on analytic jurisprudence in its analysis of law; ethics and aesthetics in its analysis of love; political philosophy in its analysis of freedom; biblical scholarship in its interpretation of Paul; the history of ideas in its study of the formation and transformation of these ideas; and moral philosophy in concluding how one could lead a life of law, love and freedom.

<p>In this dissertation, I advance a new interpretation of the meaning and political implications of Isaiah Berlin's theory of value pluralism. My argument focuses on two puzzles within the literature on value pluralism: first, value pluralist political theorists advance a variety of differing political views on an ostensibly value pluralist basis; second, and more deeply, their writings betray significant ambiguity on what value pluralism means in the first place. I identify two central sources of these problems. First, two distinct sets of ideas in Berlin's work, which I label the "moral-practical" and "societal groupings" versions of value pluralism, are persistently conflated by both Berlin and more recent value pluralist theorists. Second, attempts to justify a political view on the basis of value pluralism run aground on a "priority problem" stemming from the central value pluralist concept of incommensurability. In my approach, I maintain the distinction between the moral-practical and societal groupings theories, focusing on the moral-practical version as a more original and less well-understood contribution of Berlin's thought. I also develop a strategy, which I call "giving incommensurability its due," that avoids the priority problem by focusing on metaethical (or second-order), epistemic, and procedural considerations. This strategy supports two major sets of political implications: a liberal-constitutional framework of basic rights and liberties, and a robust, vibrant form of participatory and deliberative democratic politics. This turn to democracy constitutes an important shift vis-à-vis the current literature, which has, up to now, been preoccupied with value pluralism's relationship to liberalism.</p> / Dissertation

The purpose of this essay is, in a political philosophy perspective, to offer an illumination of John Stuart Mill¡¦s thoughts on modernity. In this essay, firstly, in the first chapter, I will try to elaborate the reason why I write this essay and take a perspective of history and political philosophy as my analytic viewpoint. Moreover, I also briefly introduce Mill¡¦s writings and the frameworks of this essay. In the second chapter, I describe the events, movements, and thoughts that gradually shape the modernity. From the standpoints of Weber, Hume and Romanticism, I also refer to one of the most important characteristics of modernity in political philosophy: value pluralism. In Mill¡¦s thoughts, how to response to the problem derived from value pluralism is my most important discourse. In the following chapter, I offer an exposition to detail Mill¡¦s discourses on modernity, focusing on his utilitarianism and liberalism. I mainly discuss how Mill¡¦s principles of utility and liberty response to the problem derived from value pluralism. I also discuss two contemporary thinkers¡¦ thoughts to find Mill¡¦s discourses on modernity, namely John Rawls and John Gray. In the fourth chapter, I assess and review the criticisms on Mill¡¦s discourses on modernity. In the conclusion chapter, I briefly go through the major viewpoints of this essay.

In this study, John Gray&rsquo / s theory of value-pluralism is critically analyzed. Gray&rsquo / s modus vivendi, based on Isaiah Berlin&rsquo / s criticism of monism, is a theory that aims to create the conditions in which peace and diversity in late-modern societies can be protected. Gray argues that a legally pluralistic system where collectives have autonomy is more serving to peace than its liberal alternatives. This study argues that Gray fails to achieve its goal of promoting diversity. This is due to the fact that Gray&rsquo / s theory does not recognize &lsquo / personal autonomy&rsquo / and &lsquo / right of exit&rsquo / as standards for a legitimate regime. It is argued in this study that without &lsquo / personal autonomy&rsquo / and &lsquo / right of exit&rsquo / , legally pluralist systems curb the conditions that makes diversity possible and thereby work at the expense of diversity rather than for diversity.