The limits and burdens of rights

Friedrich Kratochwil

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139583930.012

Meditation 8 - The limits and burdens of rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014

Friedrich Kratochwil

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Friedrich Kratochwil: Affiliation:
European University Institute, Florence

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Introduction

The previous Meditation was concerned with the emergence of the human rights talk and its politics. By investigating its grammar and by showing its heterogeneous sources I tried to counteract the quasi-theological narrative within which this talk is frequently embedded. In addition, I intended to point to specific interactions between political processes and law that account for the hegemonic character of the rights talk in modernity and post-modernity. Not only are rights everywhere, policy problems, as well as general moral questions, are also increasingly phrased in terms of “the right to.” They are displacing former conceptions of the salus publica, of the police powers of the state, of civic or personal virtue, or even of duties that we owe to ourselves or to others. This leads not only to a certain impoverishment of the political and perhaps even moral discourse which Glennon and Gilligan have noted, but also as to some conceptual puzzles which Waldron addressed.

The rights talk is also responsible for the phenomenal explosion of rights, from animal rights to the right of receiving a “promotion” at work. There is apparently little concern with the embeddedness of such remedies in certain specific social structures and with the heuristic costs of a conceptual stretch, when the modern factory worker is taken as an a-temporal “universal” paradigm. But such an ideal type certainly does not sit well with that of self-employed professionals, who probably cannot even fathom what a right to promotion would entail. Similarly, resisting the tendency of assigning rights to animals has to do with the inaptness of protecting all things by rights. After all, “claiming” or “standing on one’s rights” is central to the notion “having rights” both in terms of agency, which is thereby constituted, but also in terms of the duties that are then assigned to others.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Status of Law in World Society
Meditations on the Role and Rule of Law
, pp. 230 - 260

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139583930.012 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2014

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