Tag: <span>05 political</span>

Tag: 05 political

Online Resources

Rights, Law and Political Community (Lockwood O’Donovan, 2003)

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Most citizens of this country and of other advanced western and westernizing nations approve of human rights, some more guardedly than others; and most perceive rights to belong to the moral, political and legal fabric of modern liberal democracy. By rights, I mean rights attributable to subjects, to persons, whether individual or collective ‘persons’. To suggest that rights, freedom, and democracy go together (as does the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which has been the template for subsequent generations of declarations) is a modern truism, which, like most truisms, is largely true. Less clearly perceived, I think, is the extent to which human rights and democracy are bound up with liberal economics and free-market capitalism.

Online Resources

The Physician as Political Actor: Late Abortion and the Strictures of Liberal Moral Discourse (Brian Brock, 2006)

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By examining the range of factors pressing on medical professionals faced with a decision in a case of late-term abortion, it becomes apparent that the theological resources ruled out of bounds by the standard account can be
considered an essential part of a truly liberating and properly supple moral account of medical decision-making. Close attention to the social, political and legal context of contemporary medicine reveals that the standard account of medical ethics, Principles of Biomedical Ethics by Beauchamp and Childress, despite its universalist aspirations, disempowers rather than empowers moral decision-making by medical professionals.

Online Resources

“Judge not” and “Judge for yourselves” (O’Donovan, 2013)

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[gview file="http://symposiumonjudgment.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/judge-not-and-judge-for-yourselves.pdf" save="1"]

The presenting question about the category of judgment is its ambivalence: why is it an activity that we are sometimes warned against, sometimes encouraged to undertake? To begin with, we must make some
cursory observations on the scope of the term.

Online Resources

The Language of Rights and Conceptual History (O’Donovan, 2009)

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In the Journal of Religious Ethics in 2009 O’Donovan offered a critical reading of Nicholas Wolterstorff on rights

Abstract

The historical problem about the origins of the language of rights derives its importance from the conceptual problem: of “two fundamentally different ways of thinking about justice,” which is basic? Is justice unitary or plural? This in turn opens up a problem about the moral status of human nature. A narrative of the origins of “rights” is an account of how and when a plural concept of justice comes to the fore, and will be based on the occurrence of definite speech-forms—the occurrence of the plural noun in the sense of “legal properties.” The history of this development is currently held to begin with the twelfth-century canonists. Later significant thresholds may be found in the fourteenth, sixteenth, and eighteenth centuries. Wolterstorff’s attempt to find the implicit recognition of rights in the Scriptures depends very heavily on what he takes to be implied rather than on what is stated, and at best can establish a pre-history of rights-language.
[embeddoc url="http://enlight.lib.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-AN/an178770.pdf" download="all" viewer="google"]

Wolterstorff’s reponse to him and others appeared in the same issue

[embeddoc url="http://enlight.lib.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-AN/an178777.pdf" download="all" viewer="google"]