Duncan Ivison

The very idea of republican human rights, seems paradoxical. My aim in this article is to explore this disjunctive conjunction. One of the distinctive features of republican discourse, both in its civic humanist and neo-Roman variants, is the secondary status that rights are supposed to play in politics. Although the language of rights is not incommensurable with republican political thought, it is supposed to know its place. What can republican categories of political understanding offer for grappling with the challenges of global politics? Many philosophical expressions of human rights today are Kantian or neo-Kantian in inspiration, and as a result they are plagued by the familiar difficulties raised by Kantian approaches to politics in general. In particular, the growing prominence of human rights discourse has led to withering attacks on the appeal to human rights without any effective means of enforcement. Does republicanism offer any resources for rethinking human rights, and in particular, addressing the concern with the often moralistic and depoliticizing nature of human rights talk today? What conception of human rights best promotes freedom as non-domination? Are our practices of human rights effective instruments for minimizing domination?

My claim in this paper is that what I shall call the problem of public reason became central to the political theory of the early modern period, and continues to be in ours. However the solutions we have, for the most part, inherited and developed since then are increasingly under pressure in these fractious times. Public justification may be crucial to liberal political theory, but it can take alternative and conflicting forms. Moreover, however much it is theoretically unlimited -- however much ‘reasons for us’ are always contestable and defeasible -- it is always at the same time historically patterned and thus limited

The problem of historical injustice presents a deep challenge to the aspirations of deliberative democrats, especially to those “deliberative activists” who seek to advance deliberation in deeply unjust circumstances (Fung 2005, 399). But the debate over historical injustice can itself benefi t from taking a “democratic turn.” Much of the literature is dominated by arguments over historical entitlement theories of justice or by a legalistic focus on the possibilities for compensation and reparation.1 That much of it is deeply skeptical as well is no surprise given that focus. But what is striking about actual debates over historical injustice in the world today is their intensely political character, and this character needs to be theorized much more explicitly when thinking about the nature and consequences of historical injustice. One crucial aspect of political disagreement, as opposed to moral disagreement, is that it is not just the force of good reasons that is at issue but also the application of force itself, especially by the state. The conclusion of a political deliberation does not necessarily indicate that the other side is..

According to an essentially Hobbesian account of political order, the claims of cultural and national minorities within a state to some form of constitutional or institutional recognition are morally suspect and politically undesirable. Underlying this Hobbesian logic is a particular understanding of the relation between law and politics. `Negative constitutionalism' is focused primarily on limiting the damage government can do. However the pursuit of constitutional minimalism runs up against the challenges presented by deeply diverse political communities. By investigating the manner in which Hobbes has been invoked in arguments concerning the relation between the rule of law and the `politics of recognition', I argue (i) that the distinction between the rule of law and politics is fundamentally unstable, and (ii) that in invoking Hobbes, modern theorists have missed an important element of Hobbes's own argument ± namely, his appreciation of this instability. As an example, I examine the way Hobbes is used in some of John Gray's recent writings on pluralism and liberalism.

Are there any Aboriginal rights? If there are, then what kind of rights are they? Are they human rights adapted and shaped to the circumstances of indigenous peoples? Or are they specific cultural rights, exclusive to members of Aboriginal societies? In recent liberal political theory, aboriginal rights are often conceived of as cultural rights and thus as group rights. As a result, they are vulnerable to at least three kinds of objections: i) that culture is not a primary good relevant to the currency of egalitarian justice; ii) that group rights are inimical to the moral individualism of liberal democratic societies; and iii) that pandering to group interests provides incentives for abuse and undermines the conditions required for promoting liberal egalitarian outcomes. My argument is that a successful defense of aboriginal rights will tie them to the promotion of the equal freedom of Aboriginal people, both in the formal and substantive senses, and thus to improvements in their actual wellbeing, both as ‘peoples’ and individuals. But rights and norms interact in complex ways, and the translation of particular individual and social goods into the language of rights is always fraught with difficulty.

Why is it that we respond to one form of human suffering rather than another? If we are all human beings, and thus are all capable of imagining—if only imperfectly—the pain and suffering caused by wars, famines, bombings, floods, accidents and other instances of human misery, then why should it matter if it happens to people who look like us or talk like us? Or who happen to live here rather than somewhere else? Immanuel Kant, in his amazingly prescient 1796 essay on ‘Perpetual Peace’, suggested that the moral possibilities of what we today call globalisation would only be realised when ‘the violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere’ (Kant 1991, pp. 107–8). How close to this ideal are we today?