Rights

One of the central features of Kant's moral theory is the sharp distinction he draws between the moral Tightness (legality) of actions and their moral worth or goodness (morality). As we know from the first pages of the Groundwork, the rightness of an action is determined by the conformity of the agent's maxim to the categorical imperative; the moral goodness or worth of an action is determined by the agent's motives, by whether the agent acted from the motive of duty or from some other (non-moral) empirical motive. Morally good actions must be morally right, according to Kant, whereas morally right actions are not necessarily morally good.

Constitutional liberal practices are capable of being normatively grounded by a number of different metaphysical positions. Kant provides one such grounding, in terms of the autonomously derived moral law. I argue that the work of Edmund Burke provides a resource for an alternative construal of constitutional liberalism, compatible with, and illumined by, a broadly Thomistic natural law worldview. I contrast Burke's treatment of the relationship between truth and cognition, prudence and rights, with that of his contemporary, Kant. We find that in each case where Kant's system is constructed from the first principle of autonomy, Burke's thought is oriented toward an end that is not of our making. Readings of Burke as a natural law thinker are currently out of fashion among Burke commentators; without relying, for the main thesis, on historical claims about Burke's “Thomism,” I nonetheless explore and challenge some of the assumptions that underlie the current orthodoxy.

Historically, employment rates for people with disabilities have been low. Despite legislation that prohibits the discrimination of this group in work settings, employers are reluctant to hire people with disabilities. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the experiences of employers with workers with disabilities. Three focus groups were conducted with 21 administrators from three business sectors (i.e., healthcare, hospitality, and retail). Content analysis indicated five primary themes: (1) importance of disability employment agencies and disability advocates; (2) persistence of manager bias; (3) lack of promotion opportunities; (4) costs associated with having workers with disabilities; and (5) benefits associated with having workers with disabilities. Implications include the need for intervention studies that address the challenges experienced by individuals with disabilities, particularly during hiring and promoting phases of employment, and educational efforts to inform administrators and managers of the few costs and numerous benefits associated with having workers with disabilities.

This paper takes up the question of “Who Counts?” with a three-part argument. The first part of the argument makes the case that citizenship in liberal democracies is subject to stresses caused by internal doctrinal conflict that result in the creation of semi-citizenship statuses that offer some individuals partial bundles of rights and semi-citizen statuses. Semi-citizenship is inevitable. The second part of the argument looks closely at how this affects the distribution of the political rights of citizenship: voting and representation. I make the argument that we ought not conflate voting and representation. Each is a distinct political right. People who cannot vote or do not vote are not necessarily entirely unrepresented. This is particularly evident if one takes seriously the trustee model of representation. The third part of the article compares three different cases of semi-citizenship in which groups who are counted for the purposes of the census and legislative apportionment are not accorded the vote. I examine the cases of children, non-citizens, and felons, briefly illustrating how and why trusteeship serves the first two groups and fails the third. These conclusions bolster the case for treating trusteeship as a necessary component of a liberal democratic state and for treating it skeptically in circumstances in which the trusteeship is not clearly linked to the political capabilities of the population in question.

Physical violence is a growing concern in India due to social, economic and occupational factors. According to the report of the United Nations in 2005, around two-third of married women were victims of domestic violence in India. The utilitarian source of information demands for consequential as well as a rational overview on this serious and influential concern. In this paper, a survey has been conducted in Mumbai city to examine the impact of women assault on the community. The objectives have been pigeonholed in three groups: 1) prominence of women assaults on the community or society; 2) gap between the actual numbers of cases transpired and actually reported; and 3) remedial endeavours taken against women assaults. Eventually, this paper evinces the change that could be brought in the community or society and the expectation for the appropriate legal reservations for

This article scrutinizes the last ten years of the academic debate on EU citizenship law taking nine fundamental disagreements among scholars as starting points. It explores EU citizenship’s relationship with three groups of issues of fundamental importance, including the place of this concept within the fabric of EU law, the influence of this concept on the essence of the Union as a system of multi-level governance, and its impact on the lives of ordinary Europeans. A large number of key works which influenced the Court and the legislator in the recent years is assessed to outline the likely direction of future research, as well as EU citizenship’s future development. Although the literature on the subject is overwhelmingly rich and diverse, this article aspires to provide a representative sample of issues of interest for the framing of the concept at issue from a supranational perspective, necessarily leaving national literatures aside. The first draft of this article, later profoundly amended, appeared as a Jean Monnet Working Paper (NYU Law School) 2/12.

Indian working women have treaded difficult paths to make a place of their own in their workplaces. Today, there are women achievers in each field. The social reformers of the past had played an important role in spreading education to empower women. The Constitution of India has provided positive discriminations for women. The Indian State has passed several laws and implemented policies to improve their condition. But, still, Indian women today face visible and invisible discriminations in their path. Working women even today have problems regarding inadequate and unclean toilets, sexual harassment in the workplace, unsafe roads, etc. This paper tries to paint a picture about the steps taken to improve the condition of women in the pre-independence period, international situation, role of the Indian State and the judiciary and the recommendations which may ease some of the problems faced by working women. Affirmative measures have attempted to narrow the gap between the two gender...

Now written as a chapter in Rational Freedom vol 4 The Good Life by Dr Peter Critchley

This paper looks to explore the anti-statist implications of Marx's view of the liberal discourse of rights and citizenship.
Many political thinkers argue that socialists should retain a conception of rights since rights will remain necessary in any future society on account of certain permanent, ineradicable constraints in the human condition. Such a view makes it necessary to place Marx's critique of a rights-based morality and social order in a wider context which takes a more nuanced approach to rights. This paper develops Marx's attempts to define a new socio-relational morality and politics through the way he treats the relationship between citizenship and rights.

Ante la actual contradicción en nuestro sistema jurídico, el cual trata a los seres vivos como objetos o propiedades, mientras que, a las corporaciones como sujetos de ley con personalidad jurídica y derechos, en los últimos años han surgido una serie de propuestas legislativas que proponen el reconocimiento de los derechos de la naturaleza, y entre ellos, los derechos de los ríos.

Rather than seeing law as a vague norm or overly precise and possibly untenable rights this article argues for a simpler functionalist definition of law as a set of conditionals associated with imperatives. As such it hopes to bypass two fruitless parallel debates which however do not address each other: 1) the nature of norms 2) the nature of rights.

Democracy is the most celebrated political ideology in today's context all over the world. Passing through an asymmetric trajectory, the Indian State has emerged to be the largest democracy in the world. The Indian Constitution, which guarantees a democratic polity and equal rights to its people, also contains some provisions that give vast power to the State machinery. Here, reference could be made to the Emergency Provisions of the Indian Constitution, which empower the State with enormous power that sometimes causes infringement of the rights of its people as well. The study attempts to investigate and scrutinize the role of the Indian state in providing the rights of its people during the imposition of National Emergency in 1975-77.

Community forestry is one of the most important natural resources. The concept of community participation has gained popularity as one way of ensuring sustainable forest managements. Especially in Thailand, people have been struggling for their rights to access to forests over predominant ideology of state-centralized forestry control. This paper argues that conflicts in the community forestry in Thailand are a clear case of the politics of environmental policy. Two main theses are proposed: First, state agencies have played a major role in constructing legitimacy to communities. This is problematic when the state has significant control over the ownership of the forestry. Second, Thailand has switched back and forth between parliamentary democracy to military junta for decades, which slows down the process of public participation in policy decision. Finally, this study argues that environmental resources will be successfully implemented by decentralized natural resource governance, and allow local dwellers to share the rights, access and ownership to the community forestry.

Freedom in the sense of free will is a multiway power to do any one of a number of things, leaving it up to us which one of a range of options by way of action we perform. What are the ethical implications of our possession of such a power? The paper examines the pre-Hobbesian scholastic view of writers such as Peter Lombard and Francisco Suarez: freedom as a multiway power is linked to the right to liberty understood as a right to exercise that power, and to liberation as a desirable goal involving the perfection of that power. Freedom as a power, liberty as a right, and liberation as a desirable goal, are all linked within this scholastic view to a distinctive theory of law as constituting, in its primary form of natural law, the normative recognition of human freedom.
Hobbes's denial of the very existence of freedom as a power led him to a radical revision both of the theory of law and of the relation of law to liberty. Law and liberty were no longer harmonious phenomena, but were left in essential conflict.
One legacy of Hobbes is the attempt to base a theory of law and liberty not on freedom as a multiway power, but on rationality. Instead of an ethics of freedom, we have an ethics of reason as involving autonomy. The paper expresses some scepticism about the prospects for such an appeal to reason as a replacement for multiway freedom.

The Stoic Origin of Natural Rights 1 The idea that we, as individual human beings, have intrinsic natural rights is often taken to be a distinctive achievement of the late medieval or early modern periods, and hence unknown to antiquity. Whatever particular explanation scholars offer for its origin-e.g. the rise of late medieval nominalism with its emphasis on concrete individuals; nascent capitalism and its concern to protect the interests of propertied classes; Hobbes' eschewal of explanations in terms of a natural telos and his attempt to explain human action in terms of efficient causes and, consequently, to find a source of rights in the 'efficient motions' of desire; the attempts of the Levellers to secure religious freedom; etc.-the notion of intrinsic human rights is widely held to be as foreign to antiquity " as the internal combustion engine. " 2 However, I want to suggest that for a variety of historical and philosophical reasons the Stoics offer the most appropriate starting point for considering the origins of natural rights theories. Of course, I am not claiming that the notion that all human beings have intrinsic rights ever achieved in antiquity, or indeed in any ancient philosophical theory, anything like the easy and widespread currency that it has today. We have become accustomed to seeing how every sort of political and moral demand, both at the international and domestic level, can become couched in the language of human rights, and how respect for such demands has become a principal criterion for assessing the political and moral legitimacy of particular governments. By the same token, since Rawls' A Theory of Justice, a central preoccupation of much of the recent philosophical literature has been to clarify the view that the primary function of a just society is to provide a framework for respecting the rights of individual citizens. The basic justification of rights in terms of such values as autonomy and equality, the weight that rights claims have against considerations of utility or communal solidarity, the normative grounds for rights-all these have become the questions of the hour for political philosophers. Clearly, it is beyond dispute that, since the late medieval period, the concept of individual rights has taken on a central, and recently increasingly central, role in Western political and philosophical discourse in a way unparalleled in antiquity. At the same time, however, it is equally clear that both defenders and critics of natural rights have often made assumptions about the history and origins of rights theories, assumptions that have influenced their theoretical accounts as well. To take but one prominent recent example, Alasdair MacIntyre has offered a wide-ranging critique of liberalism which he holds responsible for a variety of contemporary social and political ills. 3 He argues, for instance, that liberal rights-based theories fail to capture the

This Working Paper on the incidence and patterns of bonded labour in India was commissioned as an input to the ILO Director-General’s second global report on forced labor, entitled A global alliance against forced labor, prepared for the 93rd session of the International Labour Conference in June 2005.it aims to enrich the debate on bonded labor and its eradication in