Muhammad Ali Nasir

This essay analyses those statements that mention legal norms in negative terms. Specifically, it analyses those statements that define a legal system by mentioning how legal protection does not work and where legal protection ends, and those statements that identify what rights‐holders do not have to with their legally protected free capacities. This essay argues that these statements address a systemic question. It calls such a dynamic as negative governmentality. The argument proceeds in four steps. It introduces the concept of negative governmentality by arguing that the idea of freedom requires both the positive affirmation of moral agency and the constraining of moral agency (Section 2). It then explores how rights constitute freedom by limiting rights or making exceptions to them (Section 3). Later, it analyses how rights‐based norms prevent abuse of rights by holders of rights (Section 4). Finally, it sees how rights‐based norms constrain the legal guarantor of rights, i.e., a state (Section 5). The essay concludes by mentioning the importance of negative governmentality (Section 6).

This essay focuses on the interrelationship of regulation and private life in human rights. It argues three main points. (1) Article 8 connects the question of protection of private lives and privacies with the question of their management. Thus, Article 8 orients regulatory practices to private lives and privacies. (2) Article 8’s holders are autonomous to the extent that laws respect their private lives and privacies. They are not autonomous in a ‘pre-political’ sense, where we might expect legal rules to protect an already autonomous private life or privacy. (3) Article 8 does not simply prohibit or permit acts. In certain cases, it also ‘enables’ acts. Then, this essay introduces the idea of oikopolitics. This idea allows us to capture these three points in a useful manner. By this idea, this essay means the context (a) where the interpretation of privacy reaches out to broader social practices and norms and (b) where the status of rights-holders living their private lives makes them objects of attention.

This article focuses on the interrelationship of law and life in human rights. It does this in order to theorize the normative status of contemporary biopower. To do this, the case law of Article 2 on the right to life of the European Convention on Human Rights is analysed. It argues that the juridical interpretation and application of the right to life produces a differentiated governmental management of life. It is established that: 1) Article 2 orients governmental techniques to lives in order to ensure that both deprivation and protection of lives is lawful; 2) A proper application of Article 2 grounds itself on a proper discrimination of lives which causes Article 2 to be applied universally but not uniformly to all juridical subjects; 3) The jurisprudence of Article 2 is theoretically appreciable only in a ‘politics of life’. Finally, the article ends with a plea to analyse other fundamental human rights in the context of ‘biopolitical governmentality’.

I suggest that virtue ethics can learn from Foucault’s critical observations on biopolitics and governmentality, which identify how a good cannot be disassociated from power and freedom. I chart a way through which virtue ethics internalizes this critical point. I argue that this helps address concerns that both virtue ethics and the critical scholarship inspired by Foucault otherwise ignore. I apply virtue ethics to the contexts of refugee arrival, asylum procedure, and immigrant integration in Western Europe; I then see how Foucault’s critical thought provides a counterpoint to virtue ethics; I finally analyze how incorporating that critique allows virtue ethics to make sense of both the context and the stakes involved.