by Costas Douzinas / Critical Legal Thinking, 31 May 2013 Rights form the terrain on which people are distributed into rulers, ruled, and excluded. Power’s mode of operation is revealed, if we observe which people are given or deprived of which rights at which particular place or point in time. In this sense, human rights […]
by Costas Douzinas / Critical Legal Thinking, 30 May 2013 Thesis 4: Universalism and communitarianism rather than being opponents are two types of humanism dependent on each other. They are confronted by the ontology of singular equality. The debate about the meaning of humanity as the ground normative source is conducted between universalists and communitarians. […]
by Costas Douzinas / Critical Legal Thinking, 21 May 2013 We will explore the strong internal connection between these superficially antagonistic principles, at the point of their emergence in the late 18th century here and in the post-1989 order in the next part. The religious grounding of humanity was undermined by the liberal political philosophies […]
by Costas Douzinas / Critical Legal Thinking, 13 May 2013 Thesis 1: The idea of ‘humanity’ has no fixed meaning and cannot act as the source of moral or legal rules. Historically, the idea has been used to classify people into the fully human, the lesser human, and the inhuman. If ‘humanity’ is the normative […]
In an extremely interesting thread responding to an earlier article (Are rights universal), contributors discussed the metaphysical status of rights, their universal or local grounding and their political import. Zdenekv took me to task for not understanding that according to ‘moral realism’, people have rights ‘like any other natural property’, one could say like they have arms or legs. The answer to ‘moral realism’ was given by Jami and Barzo, failed’ asylum seekers, in Monday’s coverage of the report of refugee charity Parfras.
