Sarah Song - People in the Department - Faculty. Rights. The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library. Human Rights. First published Fri Feb 7, 2003; substantive revision Fri Dec 13, 2013 Human rights are norms that help to protect all people everywhere from severe political, legal, and social abuses.
Examples of human rights are the right to freedom of religion, the right to a fair trial when charged with a crime, the right not to be tortured, and the right to engage in political activity. These rights exist in morality and in law at the national and international levels. Historical sources for bills of rights include the Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), and the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution (1791). Early philosophical sources of the idea of human rights include Francisco Suarez (1548–1617), Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694), John Locke (1632–1704), and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). 1. . (4) Human rights have high-priority. Should human rights be defined as inalienable?. 2. Group Rights. First published Mon Sep 22, 2008 A group right is a right held by a group as a group rather than by its members severally.
The “group” in “group right” describes the nature of the right-holder; it does not describe the mere fact that the right is confined to the members of a group rather than possessed by all members of a society or by humanity at large. Much of the controversy that surrounds group rights focuses on whether groups can hold rights and, if they can, on the conditions that a group must satisfy if it is to be a right-holder. Some proponents of group rights conceive right-holding groups as moral entities in their own right, so that, as a right-holder, a group has a being and status analogous to those of an individual person. Others give groups no such independent standing, but conceive group rights as rights that are shared in and held jointly by the group's members. 1.
Respect. First published Wed Sep 10, 2003; substantive revision Tue Feb 4, 2014 Respect has great importance in everyday life.
As children we are taught (one hopes) to respect our parents, teachers, and elders, school rules and traffic laws, family and cultural traditions, other people's feelings and rights, our country's flag and leaders, the truth and people's differing opinions. And we come to value respect for such things; when we're older, we may shake our heads (or fists) at people who seem not to have learned to respect them. We develop great respect for people we consider exemplary and lose respect for those we discover to be clay-footed, and so we may try to respect only those who are truly worthy of our respect. Toleration. First published Fri Feb 23, 2007; substantive revision Fri May 4, 2012 The term “toleration”—from the Latin tolerare: to put up with, countenance or suffer—generally refers to the conditional acceptance of or non-interference with beliefs, actions or practices that one considers to be wrong but still “tolerable,” such that they should not be prohibited or constrained.
There are many contexts in which we speak of a person or an institution as being tolerant: parents tolerate certain behavior of their children, a friend tolerates the weaknesses of another, a monarch tolerates dissent, a church tolerates homosexuality, a state tolerates a minority religion, a society tolerates deviant behavior. Thus for any analysis of the motives and reasons for toleration, the relevant contexts need to be taken into account. 1. Democracy. First published Thu Jul 27, 2006 Normative democratic theory deals with the moral foundations of democracy and democratic institutions.
It is distinct from descriptive and explanatory democratic theory. It does not offer in the first instance a scientific study of those societies that are called democratic. It aims to provide an account of when and why democracy is morally desirable as well as moral principles for guiding the design of democratic institutions. Authority. 1.
Legitimate Authority, de facto Authority and Political Power Let us start with the distinctions between political authority as a normative notion (or morally legitimate authority) and political authority as a non-normative notion (or de facto authority) and between political authority in either of these senses and political power. To say that a state has authority in the normative sense is to say something normative about the relationship between the state and its subjects.
This is the relationship that we will concentrate on in what follows. Also, the distinction between de facto and morally legitimate authority is not universally accepted or at least it is not accepted that the distinction makes a difference. Political Obligation. First published Tue Apr 17, 2007; substantive revision Fri Apr 30, 2010 To have a political obligation is to have a moral duty to obey the laws of one's country or state.
On that point there is almost complete agreement among political philosophers. But how does one acquire such an obligation, and how many people have really done what is necessary to acquire it? Or is political obligation more a matter of being than of doing — that is, of simply being a member of the country or state in question? To those questions many answers have been given, and none now commands widespread assent. Whether political obligation is the central or fundamental problem of political philosophy, as some have maintained (e.g., McPherson), may well be doubted. Coercion. First published Fri Feb 10, 2006; substantive revision Thu Oct 27, 2011 The concept of coercion has two different faces, corresponding to the two parties involved in its most ordinary cases.
On one face, it picks out a technique agents (coercers) can use to get other agents to do or not do something. On the other face, it picks out a kind of reason for why agents (coercees) sometimes do or refrain from doing something. Gränslös demokrati. Citizenship. First published Fri Oct 13, 2006; substantive revision Mon Aug 1, 2011 A citizen is a member of a political community who enjoys the rights and assumes the duties of membership.
This broad definition is discernible, with minor variations, in the works of contemporary authors as well as in the entry “citoyen” in Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie [1753].[1] Notwithstanding this common starting-point and certain shared references,[2] the differences between 18th century discussions and contemporary debates are significant. The encyclopédiste's main preoccupation, understandable for one living in a monarchy, was the relationship between the concepts ‘citizen’ and ‘subject’. Were they the same (as Hobbes asserted) or contradictory (as a reading of Aristotle suggested)? [3] This issue is less central today as we tend to take for granted that a liberal democratic regime is the appropriate starting-point for our reflections. The entry has three principal sections. 1. The Nonidentity Problem. First published Tue Jul 21, 2009; substantive revision Thu Sep 19, 2013 The nonidentity problem focuses on the obligations we think we have in respect of people who, by our own acts, are caused both to exist and to have existences that are, though worth having, unavoidably flawed – existences, that is, that are flawed if those people are ever to have them at all.
If a person's existence is unavoidably flawed, then the agent's only alternatives to bringing that person into the flawed existence are to bring no one into existence at all or to bring a different person – a nonidentical but better off person – into existence in place of the person whose existence is flawed. If the existence is worth having and no one else's interests are at stake, it is unclear on what ground morality would insist that the choice to bring the one person into the flawed existence is morally wrong.
And yet at the same time – as we shall see – it seems that in some cases that choice clearly is morally wrong. 1. Immigration. First published Mon May 10, 2010 There are a variety of important issues surrounding the morality of immigration, including difficult questions regarding the definition and moral status of refugees, the circumstances (if any) in which it is permissible to use guest workers, what obligations a rich country incurs when it actively recruits skilled workers from a poor state, and whether there are any limitations on the selection criteria a country may use in deciding among applicants for immigration.
This entry addresses each of these topics below, but first it reviews the most prominent arguments on both sides of the central debate in this area, whether states have the moral right to exclude potential immigrants. 1. Arguments for Closed Borders 1.1 Preserving Culture The most popular argument for the permissibility and importance of closing borders to outsiders is that this exclusion is necessary in order to preserve a state's distinctive culture. 1.2 Sustaining the Economy 1.7 Democracy.
Globalization. 1. Globalization in the History of Ideas The term globalization has only become commonplace in the last two decades, and academic commentators who employed the term as late as the 1970s accurately recognized the novelty of doing so (Modelski 1972). At least since the advent of industrial capitalism, however, intellectual discourse has been replete with allusions to phenomena strikingly akin to those that have garnered the attention of recent theorists of globalization.
Nineteenth and twentieth-century philosophy, literature, and social commentary include numerous references to an inchoate yet widely shared awareness that experiences of distance and space are inevitably transformed by the emergence of high-speed forms of transportation (for example, rail and air travel) and communication (the telegraph or telephone) that dramatically heighten possibilities for human interaction across existing geographical and political divides (Harvey 1989; Kern 1983). 2. 3.
Multiculturalism. 1. The claims of multiculturalism Multiculturalism is closely associated with “identity politics,” “the politics of difference,” and “the politics of recognition,” all of which share a commitment to revaluing disrespected identities and changing dominant patterns of representation and communication that marginalize certain groups (Young 1990, Taylor 1992, Gutmann 2003). Multiculturalism is also a matter of economic interests and political power; it demands remedies to economic and political disadvantages that people suffer as a result of their minority status.
Multiculturalists take for granted that it is “culture” and “cultural groups” that are to be recognized and accommodated. Yet multicultural claims include a wide range of claims involving religion, language, ethnicity, nationality, and race. 2. 2.1 Communitarian One justification for multiculturalism arises out of the communitarian critique of liberalism. 2.2 Liberal egalitarian. Identity Politics.
First published Tue Jul 16, 2002; substantive revision Tue Feb 7, 2012 The laden phrase “identity politics” has come to signify a wide range of political activity and theorizing founded in the shared experiences of injustice of members of certain social groups. Rather than organizing solely around belief systems, programmatic manifestos, or party affiliation, identity political formations typically aim to secure the political freedom of a specific constituency marginalized within its larger context.
Members of that constituency assert or reclaim ways of understanding their distinctiveness that challenge dominant oppressive characterizations, with the goal of greater self-determination. 1. Nationalism. 1. Social Institutions. 1. Federalism. First published Sun Jan 5, 2003; substantive revision Tue Mar 4, 2014 Federalism is the theory or advocacy of federal principles for dividing powers between member units and common institutions. World Government. 1. Historical Background.