Human Rights: The Hard Questions

The volume will be an edited, multidisciplinary collection of new essays focused on ten or so of the most contested questions within contemporary human rights theory and practice. By contemporary human rights theory and practice the editors are referring to something wider than universal legal rights within established international law and something narrower than universal moral rights within an ideal moral theory. They are referring to human rights as the universal moral rights properly taken up as legal rights within international law, whether by voluntary undertaking or as a matter of jus cogens. The questions addressed by the volume concern human rights in this sense.

Thus, this is not a volume addressed solely to narrowly legal questions regarding the status of particular human rights claims under existing international law. Nor is it a volume addressed solely to broadly moral questions regarding particular human rights claims one might justifiably assert only as moral claims supported by an ideal moral theory and with no aspiration toward institutional or legal embodiment within international law as we know it today. Instead, it is a volume devoted to the most contested questions of legal and political morality raised by the normative evaluation of existing international human rights law and various (not unrealistic) prescriptive recommendations for its reform.

Each contested question will be addressed by two or three essays. These will be written from different disciplinary perspectives and will defend different substantive conclusions. In this way, readers will be forced to examine each contested question from at least two and often three very different points of view. The disciplinary perspectives represented will include philosophy, international law, political science, religious studies, women's studies, and anthropology, among others. We anticipate a total of approximately 25 substantive essays. As editors, we will provide a substantive introduction to the volume. We expect essays of roughly 7,000 words. Thus, we are proposing a volume of roughly 180,000 words. This, we think, is a length well-suited to, inter alia, class room use.

The work will not focus on fixed or consensus views regarding human rights theory and practice today within any one discipline or across any set of disciplines. There are already volumes available or planned that report and explain fixed or consensus views. Nor will the work be focused solely on any one contested question (e.g., what are the moral and philosophical foundations of established human rights within international law?), or focused on any one discipline's approach to one or more contested questions (e.g., philosophers on whether there is, or ought to be, a human right to liberal democratic government? Or on whether human rights require a world state? And so on.) Again there are already volumes of this sort available or planned. Instead, what the work will examine from different disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives is several of the most contested questions today in human rights theory and practice.