Is there a formal argument against positive rights?

1989 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Melnyk
Keyword(s):  
Formal Argument ◽  
Positive Rights

Formal Argument that Contract Meaning Depends on Linguistic Cooperation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Bradley Kar
Keyword(s):  
Formal Argument

Stability, natural rights, and the limits of prudence

2021 ◽  
pp. 000332862110287
Author(s):  
Matthew Lee Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Natural Rights ◽  
Positive Rights

This essay investigates Prof. Nigel Biggar’s critique of natural rights and his subsequent reliance upon “prudence” to secure positive rights for citizens. It offers a modest defense of natural rights as explanatory for certain intuitions, while raising questions about whether positive rights are sufficiently stable on Prof. Biggar’s view.

The Positive State

2019 ◽  
pp. 129-137
Author(s):  
Judith N. Shklar
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Positive Rights ◽  
The Common ◽  
Positive State ◽  
The Way

In this chapter Shklar identifies the problems that arise with the development of industrial capitalism. She traces the emergence of social obligations to fellow citizens and the new concerns this raised, paying particular attention to the way the English idealist T.H. Green addressed these issues. She discusses the thinking behind the new welfare state and the rising popularity of social norms and obligations, often also expressed in terms of “the common good,” “positive rights,” and “the obligation to be just.”

scholarly journals RELIGION AND RELATIONS BETWEEN GENDERS

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-158
Author(s):  
Miroljub Jevtić
Keyword(s):  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Legal Structure ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
Positive Rights ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Familial Relations

Contemporary world rests on an idea of an inalienable equality regardless of one’s faith, ethnicity or race. An important factor that impacts such inalienable equality is religion. Religions have a well developed view of the world and society that includes detailed arrangements between genders. In some religions, the legal social construct is very much related to the theology. These religions demand that the rules of familial relations acquire the power of positive rights. It is through these channels that religious tradition and practice become part of a legal structure in some parts of the world. The consequences are felt on the social and political relations between genders as well as on relations between religions in those societies.

Formal Argument and Olympiodorus’ Development as a Plato-Commentator

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 210-241
Author(s):  
Harold Tarrant
Keyword(s):  
Sixth Century ◽  
Formal Argument ◽  
Formal Validity

Abstract Olympiodorus led the Platonist school of philosophy at Alexandria for several decades in the sixth century, and both Platonic and Aristotelian commentaries ascribed to him survive. During this time the school’s attitude to the teaching of Aristotelian syllogistic, originally owing something to Ammonius, changed markedly, with an early tendency to reinforce the teaching of syllogistic even in Platonist lectures giving way to a greater awareness of its limitations. The vocabulary for arguments and their construction becomes far commoner than the language of syllogistic and syllogistic figures, and also of demonstration. I discuss the value of these changes for the dating of certain works, especially where the text lectured on does not demand different emphases. The commitment to argument rather than to authority continues, but a greater emphasis eventually falls on the establishment of the premises than on formal validity.

HISTORIOSOPHICAL PREREQUISITES FOR THE FORMATION OF THE CULT OF PERSONALITY IN THE BIOGRAPHIES OF V.I. LENIN 1924–1956

2021 ◽  
pp. 136-146
Author(s):  
Elena V. Barysheva ◽  
◽  
Dmitriy V. Morozov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Formal Argument ◽  
Cult Of Personality ◽  
The One ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Plot Structure

The authors make an attempt to analyse on the basis of Hayden White’s theory of historical narrative historiosophical prerequisites for the formation of the cult of personality in the soviet biographies of V.I. Lenin published in 1924–1956. The basis of texts is a plot structure, implying, on the one hand, the existence of immutable laws of historical development, which humanity is forced to obey, and, on the other, a person who is able to learn them through the bitterness of defeats and put them at his service. The explanation of the facts of the historical narrative takes place by using two types of formal argument: Mechanism, which emphasizes the laws of historical development and the role of the masses in the historical process, and organicism, which gives high priority to V.I. Lenin himself and the party he created. The authors conclude that the articulation of the plot structure and types of formal argument embodied in the biographies becomes a prerequisite for the formation of the cult of personality. The latter implies the construction of an image of a person capable of transforming the reality, according to the concept of historical development that dominates in the party political historiography

Positive Rights and Globalization of Duties

2013 ◽  
pp. 563-575
Author(s):  
Txetxu Ausín
Keyword(s):  
Positive Rights

Insecurity and Human Rights

2020 ◽  
pp. 129-152
Author(s):  
Liora Lazarus
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
First Century ◽  
Positive Rights ◽  
State Coercion ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Extension Of State ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
State Protection

The twenty-first-century challenge that the chapter faces is how to ensure that positive rights to state protection are properly balanced against duties of state restraint in a climate of insecurity. It argues that, contrary to conservative caricatures, human rights are not only liberal ‘politically correct’ mechanisms of state restraint. Rather they have become increasingly associated with the extension of state coercion, a process which risks securitizing human rights. While courts have had to balance carefully between these imperatives, politicians and philosophers are less keenly aware of the danger that human rights will be instrumentalized to legitimize overblown claims to state coercive protection. The chapter concludes by arguing that we can follow the lead of courts, who have had to confront the nuanced balance between duties of protection and restraint, and start to embrace a concept of ‘tolerable insecurity’. Only by embracing the risks that come with freedom can we have a productive debate about the relationship between insecurity and human rights.

Are there Natural Rights? The Sceptical Critique and the Modern Roman Catholic Tradition

2020 ◽  
pp. 74-92
Author(s):  
Nigel Biggar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Jacques Maritain ◽  
Positive Rights ◽  
Rerum Novarum ◽  
The Common ◽  
John Finnis ◽  
Catholic Tradition

This chapter examines the modern Roman Catholic appropriation of rights-talk, in order to see whether or not Catholic tradition has proven better than other ‘modern’ traditions at meeting the sceptics’ objections to natural rights. It focuses particularly on Rerum Novarum, Jacques Maritain, ‘Pacem in Terris’, and John Finnis and, in passing, it criticises Samuel Moyn’s construal of twentieth-century Catholic thought on rights. It concludes that, through its affirmation of a larger moral order (‘natural law’), Catholic thinking about rights has shown itself more ready to talk in terms of moral categories other than ‘rights’. It is also unusual in the prominence it gives to the concept of the common good, although typically without offering any exact explanation of how this relates to individual rights—except in the case of John Finnis. Finnis also identifies a common problem with much other ‘modern’ rights-talk: that, since the very concept of a right has an absolute, ‘conclusory’ force, rights-talk has the logical tendency to shut down wider deliberation about justice. Instead, he argues, rights should emerge at the end of deliberation about a range of factors—moral, social, and political—rather than be invoked at the beginning. This appears to affirm socially contingent positive rights rather than absolute natural ones. But that is not the whole story, because the Catholic rights tradition consistently asserts some absolute natural rights. These, however, are either tautologous or practically unilluminating.

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