The Development of Human Rights Half a century ago, the world welcomed some of the most remarkable human rights documents it had ever seen. The United States Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These were America’s strongest statutory rebukes to its long and tragic history of…
First of all, let me thank David Little, Jennifer Herdt, John Milbank, Joel Harrison, Hans-Martien ten Napel, and Mark Hill for taking the time and trouble to comment on my book. The process of responding to what they have written has helped me understand my own thinking better, even when it has not led me…
First of all, let me thank David Little, Jennifer Herdt, John Milbank, Joel Harrison, Hans-Martien ten Napel, and Mark Hill for taking the time and trouble to comment on my book. The process of responding to what they have written has helped me understand my own thinking better, even when it has not led me…
First of all, let me thank David Little, Jennifer Herdt, John Milbank, Joel Harrison, Hans-Martien ten Napel, and Mark Hill for taking the time and trouble to comment on my book What’s Wrong with Rights? (Oxford University Press, 2020). The process of responding to what they have written has helped me understand my own thinking better,…
March 11, 2021 marked the first anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring COVID-19 a global pandemic. During this past year, a staggering 118,268,575 people contracted the virus, while 2,624,677 have died. As the world came to terms with the implications of this international public health crisis, governments the world over imposed restrictions on all…
Contemporary discussions of rights tend to be about where to place a caesura between acceptable and unacceptable kinds of rights. This caesura is primarily a matter of valuation, but it can also be one of historical narration: at a certain point in past time, a barrier between the acceptable and the unacceptable was crossed. For…
Nigel Biggar’s publications are predictable, but never uninteresting: predictable in that he is unashamedly a conservative moral philosopher who self-defines as a professional Christian ethicist, a description which seems to imply that mere amateurs, myself included, function with a less well-developed moral compass, or perhaps without one at all. His new book What’s Wrong With…
What’s Wrong with Rights is a superb book. If there is one subject that lends itself to interdisciplinary research, it is that of human rights. To the extent that lawyers have ever been able to claim a monopoly, those days are now well behind us. In this book, Nigel Biggar makes a fundamental contribution from…
Nigel Biggar is essentially right about rights. They are indeed paradigmatically legal. They are indeed conditional and limited. And it is indeed the case that they can neither be justly defined nor respected without attention to circumstances or without the virtues that enable agents properly to attend to the relevant circumstances. Biggar’s book What’s Wrong…
In his book What’s Wrong with Rights?, Nigel Biggar argues that “the task is actually not to jettison talk about subjective rights, but rather to save it by re-setting it in a larger framework of objective right” (142). In Biggar’s view, advocates, activists, scholars, and, most problematically, judges claim that rights are natural, meaning they…