Abstract

As is widely acknowledged, the language of human rights, especially after the end of the Cold War, has been the lingua franca of moral and political claim-making. The ‘success’ of human rights in the sense of its popularity in public discourse is accompanied by the ‘failure’ of the philosophical analysis of human rights which is characterized by persistent disagreements about the moral content and political effectiveness of human rights. Despite the diversity of different theories of human rights, a standard classification in the Anglo-American philosophical literature is to make a division between what is variously called ‘natural law’, ‘naturalistic’ or ‘moral’ conceptions and what is called ‘political’, ‘practical’ or ‘institutional’ conceptions of human rights. Defenders of the naturalistic conception emphasize the moral aspect of human rights in the sense that they perceive human rights as a subset of moral rights articulating particularly weighty moral concerns, especially valuable goods or interests of human beings. The alternative political conception of human rights, on the other hand, emphasizes the political and legal aspect of human rights and takes the nature of human rights to be claims that individuals have against certain institutional structures, in particular modern states. This dissertation aims to offer an alternative understanding of human rights. For this purpose, I offer a democratic account of human rights. The democratic account of human rights is threefold. First, it conceives an internal connection between democracy and human rights. According to the democratic account, there is a conceptual connection between human rights and democracy in the sense that they mutually presuppose each other. Second, the democratic account grounds human rights on the right to justification proposed by Rainer Forst. Moreover, according to the democratic account, this right to justification may be instantiated as a right to resistance in real-life rights struggles. Third, the democratic account has an understanding of human rights which conceives social rights as human rights. The theoretical framework developed in this dissertation thereby shows that it is possible, in our philosophical thinking, to take a perspective that is in tune with the experience of the participants of social struggles for rights without losing the moral authority of human rights.

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I.A.M. Robeyns (Ingrid)
Erasmus University Rotterdam
The financial support provided by the Netherlands Organization for International Cooperation in Higher Education (NUFFIC) and the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics (EIPE) is gratefully acknowledged.
hdl.handle.net/1765/78345
Erasmus School of Philosophy

Bagatur, S. (2015, June 19). In Defense of a Democratic Account of Human Rights. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1765/78345