Human Duties and the Limits of Human Rights Discourse

Provides a comprehensive discussion of the controversial human duties declarations promulgated in recent decades

Uses Kant's taxonomy of duties as a guideline to distinguish genuine from spurious human rights' claims

Challenges the pervasive idea that (duties of) justice is/are more important than (duties of) virtue

Provides a critique of the dominance of human rights discourse not only from the 'external' perspective of political philosophy, but also from within human rights discourse itself

Includes a study of the Universal Declaration's drafting history, which shows that the drafters initially meant to achieve a balance between rights and duties, a lesson that has since then been forgotten

Auteur
Eric R. Boot studied philosophy and literary studies at the University of Amsterdam, the Naples Eastern University and the Free University of Berlin. In 2010 he graduated with a MA thesis on the concepts of freedom and responsibility in the works of Kant and Heidegger. As of June 2011 he started work on his PhD in philosophy of law (supervised by prof. dr. Thomas Mertens and dr. Ronald Tinnevelt) at the Faculty of Law of the Radboud University Nijmegen. For the duration of the spring semester 2013 he visited the Department of Philosophy of the University of Pennsylvania as a visiting scholar. His supervisor there was prof. dr. Kok-Chor Tan. Following the completion of his PhD with honors (cum laude), he started work at Leiden University in December 2015 on the three-year postdoctoral project Unauthorized Disclosures, which is part of the project Democratic Secrecy: Philosophical Analysis of the Role of Secrecy in Democratic Governance. This project is funded by the European Research Council and will be executed under the supervision of dr. Dorota Mokrosinska. Additionally, he is the coordinator of the Study Group Political Philosophy, of the Dutch Research School of Philosophy (OZSW). Finally, in 2017, he won both the Praemium Erasmianum for best dissertation in the fields of the humanities and social sciences and the dissertation prize of the Netherlands Association for Philosophy of Law (VWR).

Contenu

List Of Abbreviations.- Introduction.- Chapter 1 The Debate Concerning Human Duties.- Chapter 2 Duties and Rights.- Chapter 3 Two Contentious Duties.- Chapter 4 Subsistence Needs and Individual Duties.- Chapter 5 Duties to the Community and Civic Virtue.- Conclusion.