A collage of images, featuring most prominently a person holding a sign reading "no justice no peace"

Category: Rights

Climate / International / Rights

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Rethinking Human Rights in the Context of Climate Change

This is a guest post by Jelena Belic, Lecturer in Political Theory at Leiden University, and Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh, Assistant Professor of Public International Law at Leiden University. It discusses their reflections on the place of human rights in action on climate change following a recent conference they hosted on these issues. 

As other means of tackling the problem of climate change, including inter-state negotiations, do not deliver what is needed, there is an increasing turn toward framing the effects of climate change in terms of human rights violations and searching for remedies. But can human rights as we know them deliver what is expected of them? Scholars and practitioners from different disciplines and corners of the world gathered to examine this multi-faceted question during a 2-day conference organized by the newly established research group on human rights and climate change as part of the Global Transformations and Governance Challenges programme at Leiden University.

While the speakers engaged with multiple questions and offered diverse perspectives, they agreed that human rights in their current legal form and the mechanisms that are supposed to protect them need to undergo a significant transformation if they are to serve important purposes in addressing the harms of climate change. Here we would like to note three avenues of the human rights ongoing transformations concerning their normative foundations, content, and the rise of climate litigation.

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Democracy / General / Governance / Rights

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Are Persons with Intellectual Disabilities Unjustly Disenfranchised?

In July 2020 the Romanian Constitutional Court declared that the institution of judicial interdiction, which deprived people deemed to have severe intellectual disabilities[1] of numerous civil rights, is unconstitutional. Thus, while the Constitution itself still requires that people with intellectual disabilities placed under judicial interdiction are to be disenfranchised, the provision is de facto inapplicable, making the next round of elections the first in Romania’s history where people with severe intellectual disabilities will be included in the demos. Other countries have more explicitly embraced this type of enfranchisement, with both France and Spain making legislative changes that grant voting rights to people with intellectual disabilities in 2018. Consequently, about half of EU Member States now endorse the electoral exclusion of people with intellectual disabilities, in some form, while the other half fully include them. At a global level, the situation is starkly different, however, with a 2016 study on all 193 UN countries showing that only 11% had provided full enfranchisement up to that point. Thus, it can be said that as of 2022, only a small minority of states abide by Article 29 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, according to which states should “ensure that persons with disabilities can effectively and fully participate in political and public life on an equal basis with others, directly or through freely chosen representatives, including the right and opportunity for persons with disabilities to vote […]”.

Of course, the normative force of arguments for or against any form of disenfranchisement cannot be primarily derived from the provisions of international law. And, in fact, even from this perspective any judgement would not be so clear-cut, considering the recent decision by the European Court of Human Rights to uphold the practice of disenfranchisement for reasons of intellectual capacity as legitimate in the case of Strøbye and Rosenlind v. Denmark. So what can be said in justification of this policy?

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Animals / Distribution / Duties / Governance / Rights

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What Do We Owe to Pandemic Puppies?

For many, having an animal companion during the pandemic has been a blessing. Someone to keep you company, someone to play with, someone who brings you joy and gives you a reason to get out of bed. Indeed, in the UK, the Pet Food Manufacturers’ Association (PFMA) reported that 3.2 million households in the UK have acquired an animal companion since the start of the pandemic. This brings the total number of animal companions in the UK up to 34 million, including 12 million cats and 12 million dogs, and equates to 17 million households being responsible for an animal’s welfare. (more…)

Gender / Governance / Rights

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Combining public policies and transformative action in fighting against gender violence

In this contribution, Katarina Pitasse Fragoso and Nathália Sanglard reflect on gender violence and public policies. 

 Gender violence is a form of physical, verbal, psychological or symbolic damage, caused directly or indirectly to the person due to her gender identity. It is an injustice, because, according to Elizabeth Anderson, it has been generated by arbitrary systems, such as patriarchal ones, which use gender as a justification to harm others and prevent access to resources, rights, the job market and other services. In this article, we will explore how these types of violence disproportionately affect women and feminized subjects, and we will propose some ways to enhance mainstream public policies, through a combination of actions and participatory devices. (more…)

Children / General / Liberty / Rights

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Having slaves and raising children

When I said yes to co-writing a book on surrogacy, I thought it would be just a straightforward application of my general view that moral rights over children, including the right to custody, are grounded in children’s own interests rather than in any interest of the right holder. And in a way it is: in a nutshell, I argue that custody is a prerogative, and hence cannot be sold or gifted. A practice that permits people to transfer it at will is illegitimate. But, along the way, I’m making interesting discoveries; one of them is just how far one may push the analogy between holding slaves and raising children in a world like ours, which has not yet fully outgrown the long tradition of denying rights to children. Many contemporary philosophers of childrearing should find the analogy plausible, even if they don’t share my view about the justification of the right to custody. Let me explain. (more…)

Health / Rights

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A Puzzle about Disability and Old Age

In this post, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen discusses their recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on the connections between disability-related disadvantages and old-age-related disadvantages.

Many think that being disabled and being old are worse for a person than being able-bodied and being young respectively. However, many think differently about these two disadvantages. Specifically, they think that while the disadvantages of disabled people are (largely) due to ableism, the disadvantages of old age are not due to ageism, but simply reflects a regrettable, unavoidable fact of life. In a recent article, I argue that this view is untenable. More generally, I suggest in the light of how our thinking of one of these forms of disadvantages constrains our thinking about the other that much of the previous debate about the badness of disability and old is misdirected.

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Punishment / Rights

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A Criminal Law for Semi-Citizens

In this post, Cristián Irarrázaval Zaldívar and Ivó Coca-Vila discuss their recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on how to legitimate punishment in the context of varying forms of citizenship.

Ask yourself why an English court can legitimately punish an Indonesian who committed an offence in Japan but now lives in the UK, or a Spanish judge can punish a young Senegalese criminal offender who, after months crossing through Africa, enters Spain illegally and subsists in absolute hardship hidden from state authorities. Probably your answer would be something along the lines that punishment is necessary to prevent harm. Indeed, that is how most criminal law scholars respond. However, among contemporary authors, it is increasingly common to assert that the criminal law of a given state should be applicable only to those who, at the time of the commission of the offence, had some kind of political bond with it, namely, to those who belonged to the polity as “citizens”. In our recent article, we explain why the advantages of this approach outweigh the downsides, at least as long as we take seriously the fact that citizenship is not all-or-nothing, but comes in degrees. (more…)

Gender / Punishment / Rights

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Is the criminal law the best tool to fight discrimination and hate-based violence?

In the past few months, a central topic of discussion in Italian public debate has been the Ddl Zan, a proposed bill to combat discrimination and violence on the grounds of sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation and disability. The bill does not create any new crimes but extends to these categories existing criminal legislation that currently covers discrimination and violence on the grounds of racial, ethnic and religious reasons as well as incitement to commit such acts. Such acts of discrimination and violence and their incitement can either be punished with a fine or a prison sentence to up to 4 years or, in case these actions already constitute a more serious crime, the penalty can be increased to up to double. The Ddl Zan also includes measures to support victims as well as broader initiatives to fight discrimination and inequalities, including the creation of a National Day against homophobia. Unsurprisingly, the bill has been the object of a heated debate. The LGBTQ+ movement and the majority of the feminist movement as well as other progressive forces are fighting for its approval, while conservatives argue that the bill endangers freedom of speech and imposes a supposedly divisive worldview. Setting this aside, I want to address another issue in connection to this bill, namely that of whether the criminal law should be regarded as the right instrument to fight discrimination and this kind of violence.

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Democracy / Distribution / Economics / Rights

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Can Someone Be Too Rich?

In this post, Dick Timmer discusses their recent article in Journal of Applied Philosophy on why we should limit people’s wealth.

How we think about wealth has a profound impact on the world in which we live. Some years ago, philosopher Ingrid Robeyns proposed a new perspective on wealth, which she dubbed limitarianism. Robeyns argues that once people can live a fully flourishing life, additional wealth lacks moral value for the holder because it does not contribute their flourishing. And because such wealth threatens political equality, leaves many people’s urgent needs unmet, and could be used to address the current climate crisis, such wealth should be redistributed.

In my paper, I defend a version of this view. I argue that there are good political and ethical reasons to prevent people from having more than a certain amount of wealth. Above some point, wealth has little if any value for the holder, yet it could have huge value if redistributed.

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Animals / Children / Climate / Democracy / Distribution / Economics / Education / Gender / General / Liberty / Migration / Moral values / Punishment / Rights / War / Work

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Introducing Political Philosophy with Public Policy

What is a good way to learn about political philosophy? Plausibly there is a variety of reasonable answers to this question, depending on what and why one wants to know about the subject, and it is some testament to this that there are excellent introductions that focus on the issues, concepts, and key thinkers in the field.

In our recent book – Introducing Political Philosophy: A Policy-Driven Approach – Will Abel, Elizabeth Kahn, Tom Parr, and I offer an approach that focuses on introducing the subject through the lens of public policy.

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