Abstract
This introduction justifies the relevance of this volume and presents its purpose, structure, content and methodology.
The study that follows is a long journey focused on the ethical significance of human rights. Its scope and rationale are reflected in its three-part structure. It aims at contributing to a universal culture of human rights with deep roots and wide horizons. While not discussing every viewpoint quoted, nor elaborating on too specific matters, it touches on much of the typical syllabus of a human rights course and also explores emerging issues.
This study consists principally of normative research, drawing on International Human Rights Law as it currently stands and functions. The study combines different approaches but takes a predominantly juridical one. Its extended legal and jurisprudential content, as well as the communicative and argumentative rationality peculiar to the normative field, require broad quotations from a variety of sources.
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Notes
- 1.
The Club of Rome was founded by an Italian manufacturer (Aurelio Peccei) and a Scottish scientist (Alexander King). As informs its electronic site:
The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 as an informal association of independent leading personalities from politics, business and science, men and women who are long-term thinkers interested in contributing in a systemic interdisciplinary and holistic manner to a better world. The Club of Rome members share a common concern for the future of humanity and the planet.
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The Commission on Global Governance, established in 1993, was an initiative of Willy Brandt, former West German Chancellor. It is composed of 28 selected personalities. (www.globalgovernancewatch.org/authors/-commission-on-global-governance)
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The founder of the Humanist Movement was the Argentine writer Mario Rodríguez Cobos (1938–2010), known as Silo, in 1969, in Punta de Vacas, mountain of Andes, close to the border of Argentina and Chile.
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In 1933, Charles Potter and his wife Clara C. Potter, published Humanism: A New Religion.
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Struturalism “attempted to develop research strategies that would throw light on the constant, systematic relationships that they believed existed within human behavior, individual and collective, and that they called ‘structures’” (Puledda 1997, p. 41). The concept of ‘structure’ comes from Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857–1913) Course in General Linguistics (1915) that introduced the use of the ‘structural method’ to the study of language. However, the term never appears in the Course, ‘system’ being used instead. Its spread to the other human sciences is due mainly to the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) who the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) met in New York. Lévi-Strauss “might be considered the ‘father’ of structuralism” (p. 43), having proposed that human cultures be studied as structures of verbal and nonverbal languages, so reducing Anthropology to a Semiotics.
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The documents related to the history of the UDHR drafting quoted in this study are available at: www.un.org/depts/dhl/udhr.
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“The concept of ‘international human rights norm’ is broad, and it overlaps with rights protected under other areas of international and domestic law, including international humanitarian law, international criminal law, international environmental law, development law, labor law, refugee and asylum law, constitutional law, domestic criminal law and procedure, and even the law of the sea” (Edwards 2010, p. 152).
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These diverging views go back to the UDHR drafting process. For example, at the second session of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), in December 1947, the United Kingdom (UK) representative (Lord Charles Dukeston) said that: “The world needed free men and not well-fed slaves. Therefore, in developing human rights, it was necessary to begin by proclaiming freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of thought”. On the contrary, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic representative (Klekovkin) defended that the economic, social and cultural rights “were the foundation of all other rights” (E/CN.4/SR.42).
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Regarding the European Union (EU): “Since the early 1999s, the EC [European Community] systematically included a so-called human rights clause in its trade and cooperation agreements concluded with third countries, including so-called association’s agreements” (Rosas 2009, p. 466).
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The idea of world globalization is present in the Roman historian Polybe (200–125 BC).
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This idea was introduced by Walter B. Gallie (1956) in an essay that reads:
In order to count as essentially contested, in the sense just illustrated, a concept must possess the four following characteristics: (I) it must be appraisive in the sense that it signifies or accredits some kind of valued achievement. (II) This achievement must be of an internally complex character, for all that its worth is attributed to it as a whole. (III) Any explanation of its worth must therefore include reference to the respective contributions of its various parts or features; […] In fine, the accredited achievement is initially variously describable. (IV) The accredited achievement must be of a kind that admits of considerable modification in the light of changing circumstances; and such modification cannot be prescribed or predicted in advance. For convenience I shall call the concept of any such achievement ‘open’ in character. These seem to me to be the four most important necessary conditions to which any essentially contested concept must comply.
[…]
More simply, to use an essentially contested concept means to use it against other uses and to recognize that one’s own use of it has to be maintained against these other uses. Still more simply, to use an essentially contested concept means to use it both aggressively and defensively. (p. 171, 172)
- 22.
According to Campbell (2006), “a society may be said to have a ‘rights culture’, when its members think of themselves in terms of their rights and interact with each other on the basis of their perceived rights and duties” (p. 123).
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Reis Monteiro, A. (2014). Introduction. In: Ethics of Human Rights. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03566-6_1
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