Mind and Rights combines historical, philosophical, and legal perspectives with research from psychology and the cognitive sciences to probe the justification of human rights in ethics, politics and law. Chapters critically examine the growth of the human rights culture, its roots in history and current human rights theories. They engage with the so-called cognitive revolution and investigate the relationship between human cognition and human rights to determine how insights gained from modern theories of the mind can deepen our understanding of the foundations of human rights. Mind and Rights argues that the pursuit of the human rights idea, with its achievements and tragic failures, is key to understand what kind of beings humans are. Amidst ongoing debate on the universality and legitimacy of human rights, this book provides a uniquely comprehensive analysis of great practical and political importance for a culture of legal justice undergirded by rights. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Author(s): Matthias Mahlmann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 514
City: Cambridge
Cover
Half-title
Title page
Copyright information
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Navigating Deep Waters: The Problems of Human Rights and New Perspectives of Inquiry
I.1 Critique and Defense
I.2 Reason, Conscience and Rights
I.3 The Problem of Rights
I.4 Human Rights Instruments and Heuristics of Law
I.5 The Law: In Splendid Isolation from the Troubles of Theory?
I.6 Human Rights and the Emancipation of Human Thought
I.7 The Spheres of Rights
I.8 The Inquiry into Mind and Rights
I.9 Why It Is Worth the Effort
I.10 The Line of Argument
I.11 Problems of Inquiry
I.12 Theory of Human Rights and the Ethics of a Way of Life
Part I The Concept of Human Rights and the Global History of an Idea
1 The Concept of Human Rights
1.1 Parameters of Analysis
1.2 Moral and Legal Rights
1.3 The Complex Makeup of Subjective Rights
1.4 The Holders and Addressees of Rights
1.5 The Basic Content of Human Rights
1.6 Co-possibility and Limitations of Rights
1.7 Rights and the Nature of Obligations
1.8 The Peremptory Nature of Rights
1.9 Group Rights
1.10 Ethics, Legal Hermeneutics and Justification
1.11 What Are We Talking About?
2 The Truth of Human Rights: A Mortal Daughter of Time?
2.1 Apologizing for Genocide
2.2 How to Decipher the History of Human Rights?
2.2.1 History and Human Rights Revisionism
2.2.2 Concepts and Methods of Inquiry
2.2.3 Conceptions of History
2.3 Rights on the Barricades
2.3.1 Where to Begin?
2.3.2 From Politics to Law
2.3.3 Civil Rights and Human Rights
2.4 The Growth of the Multilayered Protection of Human Rights
2.4.1 Contours of the Project
2.4.2 Constructing the Postwar World
2.4.3 Pushing the Agenda from the Periphery of Power
2.4.4 From the Universal Declaration to the Differentiated International Bill of Human Rights
2.4.4.1 Human Rights Turned into Constitutional Law
2.4.4.2 Human Rights Turned into International Law
2.5 The Parameters of Change
2.5.1 Policy and Politics
2.5.2 Regime Change and the Creation of New Political Bodies
2.5.3 Political Ideologies
2.6 The Myth of the Western Origins of International Human Rights
2.7 Lessons to Be Drawn
2.7.1 A First Lesson: The Rediscovery of the Political Roots of Human Rights
2.7.2 A Second Lesson: The Rediscovery of Autonomous Critical Thought
2.8 Politics, Ethics and a Preliminary Conclusion
3 Down the Deeper Wells of Time
3.1 Back to the Roots or Trapped in Anachronism?
3.2 A Standard Thesis
3.3 Not a Moral Blank Slate: The Perspective of Indigenous People
3.4 The Many Forms of Normative Thought in Ancient Times
3.4.1 The Imagery of Epics
3.4.2 Democracy and Rights
3.4.3 Equality
3.4.4 Slavery and the Search for Freedom, Equality and Equal Worth
3.4.5 Liberty and Tyranny
3.4.6 Rape, Injustice and Human Self-Determination
3.4.7 Justice and Rights
3.4.8 The Worth of Human Beings
3.4.9 The Human Polis
3.4.10 Actions and Rights in Roman Law
3.4.11 Varieties of Rights
3.5 Rights since Antiquity
3.5.1 Rights at the Dawn of a New (European) Era
3.5.2 Natural Rights and Medieval Rebellion
3.5.3 Natural Rights and the Conquest of America
3.5.4 Natural Rights and the Worldly Law of Reason
3.5.5 Transitions of Natural Law
3.5.6 Rights in the Best of All Possible Worlds
3.5.7 Closing the Circle: The Explicit Doctrine of Human Rights
3.6 The Many Roots of Human Rights
3.6.1 The Importance of Methods of Inquiry
3.6.2 Varieties of Rights and the Significance of Distinctions
3.6.3 Rights and Models of History
3.6.4 A Key Finding: The Long Way from Moral Intuitions to Explicit Rights
3.6.5 How to Miss the Point of Human Rights: Some Lessons from the Past
3.6.6 Not from Nowhere
3.7 The Charisma of Human Rights: Where from?
Part II Justification
4 Far from Obvious: The Quest for the Justification of Human Rights
4.1 How to Justify Human Rights
4.1.1 An Idle Question?
4.1.2 A Critical Theory of Human Goods
4.1.3 A Political Theory of Human Rights
4.1.4 A Theory of Fundamental Normative Principles
4.2 The Functions of Human Rights
4.2.1 Human Rights as Tools for Social Integration
4.2.2 Engineering Social Efficiency?
4.2.3 Human Rights and Maximizing of Happiness
4.3 Justification by Agreement
4.3.1 Discourse and Consensus
4.3.2 Justification by Contract
4.4 Human Rights and Human Existence
4.4.1 The Rights of Autonomous Agents
4.4.1.1 Human Rights and the Logic of Action
4.4.1.2 Human Rights and Normative Agency
4.4.1.3 The Concept of Agency
4.4.1.4 Agency and the Problem of Justificatory Underdetermination
4.4.1.5 Why Protect Agency?
4.4.1.6 Is There a Bridge from Agency to Rights?
4.4.1.7 The Objective Reason Argument
4.4.1.8 The Important Point of Agency Theories
4.4.2 Needs and Interests as the Engine of Rights
4.4.2.1 The Argument Based on Needs and Interests
4.4.2.2 The Reach of Need and Interest Theories
4.4.2.2.1 Needs or Interests - Or Something Else?
4.4.2.2.2 Needs, Interests and Human Dignity
4.4.3 The Capability Approach
4.4.3.1 Determining Desirable Functionings
4.4.3.2 Capabilities as Key?
4.5 Political Conception
4.5.1 Human Rights and the Veil of Ignorance in the International Sphere
4.5.2 The Political Conception Reframed
4.5.3 A Fresh Start?
4.6 Human Rights and the Art of Living Well
4.7 Summary: Affirmative Theories of Human Rights
5 A Castle of Sand?
5.1 The Sources of Human Goods
5.1.1 No Foothold for Rights?
5.1.2 The Anthropology of Human Rights and the Thresholds of Inclusion
5.1.3 Needs, Interests and Capabilities
5.1.4 Contours of a Form of Life
5.2 Better Off without Rights?
5.2.1 The Limited Reach of Rights
5.2.2 Politics beyond Normativity?
5.3 The Critique of Rights
5.3.1 The Benefits of Authoritarianism
5.3.2 Human Rights: Ineffective Ethical and Legal Balderdash?
5.3.3 Human Rights as Means of Economic Disempowerment
5.3.4 Human Rights as the Handmaidens of Power and the Prospects of Postcolonial Worldmaking
5.3.5 Feminist Critiques and Restatements of Human Rights
5.3.6 Human Rights Curtailing Democracy and Sovereignty
5.3.7 The Wrong Politics of Human Rights
5.3.8 The Aporia of Human Rights
5.4 The Political Case for Human Rights
5.4.1 The Political Theory of Entrenchment
5.4.2 Scope to Act and the Political Subjects of History
5.4.3 Human Rights as a Condition of Community
5.4.4 Human Rights as Legal Rights
5.5 Rights after Auschwitz
5.6 Normative Principles
5.6.1 Justice and Solidarity as the Wellsprings of Rights
5.6.2 Dignity and Rights
5.7 Making Human Rights Concrete
5.8 Some More Results
Part III Rights and Moral Cognition
6 Which Kind of Mind, Which Kind of Morals, Which Kind of Rights?
6.1 Ethics and the Theory of the Human Mind
6.2 The Epistemology of Moral Cognition
6.3 The Neuroscientific Attack on Human Rights: Human Rights and the Mental Gizmo Thesis
6.4 The Mental Gizmo Thesis Reconsidered
6.5 Rights and Behavioral Science
6.6 Justice and Benevolence
7 Where Did It All Come From?: Morality and the Evolution of the Mind
7.1 Morality and Evolution
7.2 Puzzling Altruism
7.3 Various Forms of Cooperation and the Problem of What Morality Is
7.4 Animal Morality?
7.5 Evolutionary Psychology
7.5.1 The Morality of Selfish Genes
7.5.2 Reciprocal Altruism
7.5.3 The Morality of Tribes
7.5.4 Explanatory Problems
7.6 The Power of Joint Intentionality: Interdependence and Cooperation
7.6.1 Some Specifics of Human Cooperation
7.6.2 Sympathy and Fairness Develop in Small Steps
7.6.3 The Path to Objective Group Morality
7.6.4 Self-Other Equivalence as a Spandrel
7.6.5 Paradigmatic Incrementalism
7.6.6 The Analysis of Morality and the Evidence for Evolutionary Incrementalism
7.6.7 Stumbling Blocks on the Way to Second-Personal Morality
7.6.8 The Objective Morality of Cogs in the Machine
7.6.9 Is There an Alternative to Incrementalism?
7.7 Evolutionary Pluralism
7.7.1 The Contested Scope of Evolutionary Theory
7.7.2 Nature Does Not Make Leaps, Does It?
7.8 The Evolutionary Possibility of Human Goodness
8 The Mentalist Theory of Ethics and Law
8.1 A Fresh Look at Frameworks of Morality
8.2 Some Properties of Moral Cognition
8.2.1 The Cognitive Space of Morality
8.2.2 Principles of Morality
8.2.3 Basic Harms, Human Rights and the ''Seeds of a Collective Conscience''
8.2.4 Volitional Consequences of Moral Judgment
8.2.5 Questions of Metaethics and the World of Moral Emotions
8.3 Explanatory Limits of Emotivism
8.3.1 Ruled by Moral Taste Buds?
8.3.2 A Testing Case: Corporal Punishment - A Question of Taste?
8.3.3 Sentimental Rules
8.4 Explaining Moral Disagreement
8.5 The Development of Moral Cognition
8.5.1 How Do We Learn to Be Moral?
8.5.2 The Moral World of Infants and Toddlers
8.6 Poverty of Stimulus and the Development of a Moral Point of View
8.7 Sentimental Rules, Rational Rules?
8.7.1 The Power of Statistical Learning
8.7.2 The Limits of Statistical Learning
8.8 Theories of Mind and Human Moral Progress
8.9 Critique and Construction: Explanatory Theory and Normative Arguments
8.10 The Epistemology of Human Rights Universalism
8.11 The Epistemology and Ontology of Morals
8.12 Epistemological Resilience
8.13 Universalism without Dogmatism and Human Rights Pluralism
8.14 A New Case for Universalism?
Epilogue: The Tilted Scales of Justice
Bibliography
Index
