John Tasioulas (King's College London – The Dickson Poon School of Law) has posted Making Human Rights Ordinary Again: A Response to Ignatieff on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
A comment on Michael Ignatieff's The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World.
And a short excerpt:
In seeking to establish principled constraints on human rights law by connecting it with human rights morality, it is vitally important to appreciate that human rights morality is not exhaustive of the whole of morality; indeed, it is not even exhaustive of everything that is important in morality. There are many weighty moral concerns that are not properly understood as human rights. Some of these concerns are rights, but not human rights, such as rights we have as members of particular groups, or animal rights, and so on. Some of them are ‘imperfect’ obligations, in the sense that they have no associated rights-bearer, such as obligations of charity or mercy. And others are moral considerations that are not obligatory, but more in the nature of supererogatory ideals, such that compliance with them may be admirable, but non-compliance is not ordinarily blameworthy. If human rights are to find a place in our moral operating systems, they must not ignore or usurp these other concerns.
Recommended.
