06.06.2024 - 07.06.2024
This workshop sets out to engage with the conceptualization and justification of human rights and to allow for detailed consideration of the argument that they are best understood as universal rights enjoyed by all individuals by virtue of their common humanity. In Mind and Rights (CUP, 2023), Matthias Mahlmann combines historical, philosophical, and legal perpectives with research from psychology and cognitive science to present a comprehensive examination of the idea of human rights. The book emphasizes the centrality of the theory of mind to the human rights project and defends an understanding of human morality as grounded in a substantive egalitarian normative theory of freedom, solidarity, and dignity. This account is built on sustained consideration of some of the most important challenges to moral universalism, notably those from historical and normative relativism and certain approaches in moral epistemology that deny the possibility of universally justified norms.
This workshop takes the publication of Mind and Rights as an opportunity not just to engage with the arguments set out in the book but also to consider the concept of justification of human rights in law, ethics, and politics more broadly. It subscribes to the central conceit in Mind and Rights that a comprehensive account of human rights will necessarily be an interdisciplinary endeavor.
The workshop will allow for the three central themes of Mind and Rights to be explored and debated.
- The first theme relates to the conceptualization and development of human rights: Are human rights as ethical or moral ideals to be distinguished from their legal and institutional implementation? Is an understanding of some sort of division between pre-institutional moral rights and post-institutional human rights (which seems to lie at the heart of many contemporary accounts of human rights, which see the essence of human rights in their institutional function in international law) to be rejected? Should human rights be understood, as Mahlmann suggests, as 'a political project derived from an ethical outlook centred on the respect for individual human beings'? (Mind and Rights, 128) Are the origins of human rights specific to a certain time or place? Or are they better understood as lying instead in a 'common human framework of experience and understanding' (Mind and Rights, 131), resting on anthropological assumptions of a kind of 'psychich unity of mankind' (Mind and Rights, 138; D. Graeber & D. Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, Penguin 2021, 80 ff.)?
- The second theme concerns the justification of human rights. A normative theory of the justification of human rights is of essential importance to any sort of meaningful epistmology of human rights. How are human rights to be justified? Assuming that a theory of human rights has to 'determine the source of the goods to be protected by human rights, outline the political theory of human rights and identify the normative principles that generate human rights' (Mind and Rights, 265), how is this to be achieved? Can a convincing political case be made for human rights as instruments to protect the justified goods (Mind and Rights, 310)? How plausible is the argument that the normative principles underpinning the justification of human rights are egalitarian justice, dignity, and solidarity (Mind and Rights, 310 ff.)?
- The third theme involves consideration of human rights and human thought and the origins of normative principles such as justice and solidarity. Can we be sure that the proposition that 'human rights are (universally) valid is in fact an act of cognition, an act of insights and not of error' (Mind and Rights, 87)? Or are human rights rather to be understood as nothing but a 'cognitive illusion? Is, as Mahlmann suggests, a 'mentalist theory of moral cognition, assuming a common framework of human moral judgment, thought and sentiment, generated by a shared faculty of moral cognition - a moral competence with well-defined principles that enables human moral judgment within its rich voliational and emotional consequences' the most promising way of accounting for the structure and content of human morality (Mind and Rights, 456)? Can this account meet the challenges of competing influential psychological theorie? Does a deeper understanding of human rights have the potential to lead to broader insights about humanity and what it means to be human (Mind and Rights, 2)?
