4 Human Rights, Global Justice, and Disaggregated States: John Rawls, Onora O'Neill, and Anne‐Marie Slaughter

Alyssa R. Bernstein

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2007, vol. 66, issue 1, 87-111

Abstract: Abstract. Human rights are urgently important rights that all individual persons may validly claim and that all governments are obligated to respect. According to some philosophers, no government can plausibly claim legitimate authority unless its legal and political system ascribes such rights, and no society can plausibly claim to be just unless it has a legitimate government. John Rawls presents his own version of this conception in the context of his account of the moral basis of a just global system of public law, which he calls the Law of Peoples. According to some of his critics, including Onora O'Neill, not only is the Law of Peoples statist, but also it relies on a false view of the state. O'Neill has developed a new conception of an ideally just global order in which states have fewer, and corporations more, powers and obligations to secure human rights, in contrast to Rawls's conception. Her conception is consistent with Anne‐Marie Slaughter's account of the transformation of state sovereignty due to globalization. However, contrary to initial appearances, it is not the case that O'Neill's and Slaughter's views taken together require significant modification of Rawls's conception of human rights. There is no fundamental conflict between Rawls's conception of human rights and Slaughter's account of state transformation. And O'Neill's criticisms of Rawls's view are unwarranted.

Date: 2007
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1536-7150.2007.00499.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ajecsc:v:66:y:2007:i:1:p:87-111

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0002-9246

Access Statistics for this article

American Journal of Economics and Sociology is currently edited by Laurence S. Moss

More articles in American Journal of Economics and Sociology from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().