Revisionist Theories of Rights: An Unwelcome Defense

1998 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alon Harel
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Uniform Structure ◽  
Marketplace Of Ideas ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Way ◽  
Societal Interests

Disputes over the scope of specific rights, e.g., over the right to free speech, the right to property, or the right to equality, often originate in differing assumptions concerning the reasons that justify the protection of these rights. Thus, those who believe that reasons of autonomy justify the right to free speech will identify the scope of this right differently from those who justify this protection through, say, appeal to the marketplace of ideas. Despite the diverse subject matter of these disputes, there is a uniform structure characterizing them. Some supporters of rights, call them “traditionalists,” locate the reasons that justify the protection of rights within individualistic concerns. Others, call them “revisionists,” deny this traditional claim and argue that rights can be partially or exclusively grounded in societal interests.Traditionalism’ and ‘revisionism’ are terms stipulated to clarify the conceptual difference between two different understandings of rights. These understandings are often implicit in the way the term ‘rights’ is used in political or legal debates concerning the scope of particular rights. At other times, these implicit understandings of the term ‘rights’ are articulated more or less explicitly by moral or political philosophers investigating the nature of rights. Thus, when the terms ‘revisionist’ or ‘traditionalist’ are used in this article, they are used in two different ways. Sometimes, they denote implicit fundamental presuppositions about the nature of rights—presuppositions which underlie many of the contemporary debates over the scope of particular rights. At other times, they denote philosophical theories exploring systematically the nature of rights and the reasons underlying them.

The Chronicler and the Count

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard L. Kagan
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Way

In 1601 an unusual and unprecedented lawsuit began at the Spanish court in Madrid. The plaintiff: the Count of Puñonrostro; the defendant, Antonio de Herrera y Tordesilla, one of the Habsburg monarchy’s official chroniclers and author of the General History of the Indies. The issue: the veracity and supposedly libellous nature of Herrera’s account of the Count’s grandfather, Pedrarias Dávila, the first Spanish governor of what is now Panama. Herrera defended his interpretation of the available sources, the truthfulness of his history, and more broadly, the right of historians to exercise what we today call free speech. In this respect, the lawsuit questioned the way history was to be written, interpreted, and, more importantly, used.

The adaptation of design thinking in auditing

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda MEIJER-WASSENAAR ◽  
Diny VAN EST
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Design Thinking ◽  
Public Organizations ◽  
Design Framework ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Way

How can a supreme audit institution (SAI) use design thinking in auditing? SAIs audit the way taxpayers’ money is collected and spent. Adding design thinking to their activities is not to be taken lightly. SAIs independently check whether public organizations have done the right things in the right way, but the organizations might not be willing to act upon a SAI’s recommendations. Can you imagine the role of design in audits? In this paper we share our experiences of some design approaches in the work of one SAI: the Netherlands Court of Audit (NCA). Design thinking needs to be adapted (Dorst, 2015a) before it can be used by SAIs such as the NCA in order to reflect their independent, autonomous status. To dive deeper into design thinking, Buchanan’s design framework (2015) and different ways of reasoning (Dorst, 2015b) are used to explore how design thinking can be adapted for audits.

Memories for the Return? Remembering the Nakba by the First Generation of Palestinian Refugees in Syria

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anaheed Al-Hardan
Keyword(s):  
First Generation ◽  
Palestinian Refugees ◽  
Oslo Accords ◽  
Right Of Return ◽  
Palestinian Refugee ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
The Way

The 1948 Nakba has, in light of the 1993 Oslo Accords and Palestinian refugee activists' mobilisation around the right of return, taken on a new-found centrality and importance in Palestinian refugee communities. Closely-related to this, members of the ‘Generation of Palestine’, the only individuals who can recollect Nakba memories, have come to be seen as the guardians of memories that are eventually to reclaim the homeland. These historical, social and political realities are deeply rooted in the ways in which the few remaining members of the generation of Palestine recollect 1948. Moreover, as members of communities that were destroyed in Palestine, and whose common and temporal and spatial frameworks were non-linearly constituted anew in Syria, one of the multiples meanings of the Nakba today can be found in the way the refugee communities perceive and define this generation.

The Logic of ‘But’: Quarrels, Literature and Democracy

Paragraph ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-130
Author(s):  
Thomas Docherty
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
The Way

This paper looks at intrinsic disputation within proposition, and specifically within propositions that offer a moderated version of the freedom of speech and expression. It begins from a consideration of what is at stake in Othello's ‘Rude am I in my speech’, a rhetorical gesture that frames an act of great eloquence, and in which the eloquence serves to formulate a quarrel by ostensibly resolving it. This example reveals that there is a conflict between empirical quarrel and articulated spoken resolution. This leads the essay to explore the way in which diplomacy works, whereby we establish the pretence that there is peace between disputatious positions through the power of the logic of ‘but’, thus: ‘I agree with you, but …’. Finally, this is extended to a consideration of the limits of and/or on free speech: ‘I defend free speech, but …’, where the ‘but’ is a gesture in which the defence of free speech is modified to the point of being obliterated.

1. Controversial Speakers, Moral Disagreements, and the Middlebury Moment

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Ashley Floyd Kuntz
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Moral Epistemology ◽  
Democratic Society ◽  
College Campuses ◽  
Institutions Of Higher Education ◽  
Student Protests ◽  
Free Inquiry ◽  
The Right

Abstract Student protests have developed on campuses throughout the country in response to controversial speakers. Overwhelmingly, these protests have been framed as conflicts over the right to free speech and the importance of free inquiry on college campuses. This essay reframes conflicts like these as moral disagreements over the role of individuals and institutions in producing and disseminating knowledge that supports or undermines justice within a pluralistic, democratic society. Using the specific case of Charles Murray’s visit to Middlebury College in spring 2017 and drawing insight from social moral epistemology, the essay aims to clarify the moral concerns at stake in clashes over controversial speakers and to identify possibilities to advance the moral aims of institutions of higher education in response to such events.

The Dynamic Free Speech Clause

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Zick
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Relational Dynamics ◽  
Free Exercise ◽  
Second Amendment ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Common ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
The Right ◽  
Speech Clause

This book examines the relational dynamics between the U.S. Constitution’s Free Speech Clause and other constitutional rights. The free speech guarantee has intersected with a variety of other constitutional rights. Those intersections have significantly influenced the recognition, scope, and meaning of rights ranging from freedom of the press to the Second Amendment right to bear arms. They have also influenced interpretation of the Free Speech Clause itself. Free speech principles and doctrines have facilitated the recognition and effective exercise of constitutional rights, including equal protection, the right to abortion, and the free exercise of religion. They have also provided mediating principles for constructive debates about constitutional rights. At the same time, in its interactions with other constitutional rights, the Free Speech Clause has also been a complicating force. It has dominated rights discourse and subordinated or supplanted free press, assembly, petition, and free exercise rights. Currently, courts and commentators are fashioning the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms in the image of the Free Speech Clause. Borrowing the Free Speech Clause for this purpose may turn out to be detrimental for both rights. The book examines the common and distinctive dynamics that have brought free speech and other constitutional rights together. It assesses the products and consequences of these intersections, and draws important lessons from them about constitutional rights and constitutional liberty. Ultimately, the book defends a pluralistic conception of constitutional rights that seeks to leverage the power of the Free Speech Clause but also to tame its propensity to subordinate, supplant, and eclipse other constitutional rights.

Comparative Views on the Right to Vote in International Law

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shai Dothan
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
National Courts ◽  
European Court ◽  
Right To Vote ◽  
The Right ◽  
Democratic Elections ◽  
The Way

There is a consensus about the existence of an international right to vote in democratic elections. Yet states disagree about the limits of this right when it comes to the case of prisoners’ disenfranchisement. Some states allow all prisoners to vote, some disenfranchise all prisoners, and others allow only some prisoners to vote. This chapter argues that national courts view the international right to vote in three fundamentally different ways: some view it as an inalienable right that cannot be taken away, some view it merely as a privilege that doesn’t belong to the citizens, and others view it as a revocable right that can be taken away under certain conditions. The differences in the way states conceive the right to vote imply that attempts by the European Court of Human Rights to follow the policies of the majority of European states by using the Emerging Consensus doctrine are problematic.

Normative Concepts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matti Eklund
Keyword(s):  
Positive Answer ◽  
Thick Concepts ◽  
Normative Concepts ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Way

What is it for a concept to be normative? Some possible answers are explored and rejected, among them that a concept is normative if it ascribes a normative property. The positive answer defended is that a concept is normative if it is in the right way associated with a normative use. Among issues discussed along the way are the nature of analyticity, and there being a notion of analyticity—what I call semantic analyticity—such that a statement can be analytic in this sense while failing to be true. Considerations regarding thick concepts and slurs are brought to bear on the issues that come up.

The Inviolability of Diplomatic Agents in the Context of Employment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Rodgers
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Fair Trial ◽  
European Convention ◽  
Employment Contracts ◽  
Domestic Servants ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Diplomatic Immunity ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Way

‘Ordinary’ employment contracts—including those of domestic servants—have been deemed to attract diplomatic immunity because they fall within the scope of diplomatic functions. This chapter highlights the potential for conflict between these forms of immunity and the rights of the employees, and reflects on cases in which personal servants of diplomatic agents have challenged both the existence of immunity and the scope of its application. The chapter examines claims that the exercise of diplomatic immunity might violate the right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the way in which courts have dealt with these issues. The chapter analyses diplomats’ own employment claims and notes that they are usually blocked by the assertion of immunity, but also reflects on more recent developments in which claims had been considered which were incidental to diplomatic employment (eg Nigeria v Ogbonna [2012]).

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