Ten practical advantages of a human rights approach to environmental advocacy

Tom Kerns ()

Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 2013, vol. 3, issue 4, 416-420

Abstract: In order to draw any conclusion about what actions should be done, practical arguments require both a first premise which makes factual claims about the world and a second premise which asserts a value claim. This paper argues that among the second premise value claims available in environmental advocacy, a human rights approach includes distinct advantages that are not as available when relying only on other ethical approaches. The paper describes three practical measures that can be used in environmental human rights work—personal narratives, human rights assessment reports, and citizen-based inquiries and tribunals—and 10 practical advantages of using those and other human rights measures. These include helping to minimize the problem of moral relativism, appeals to compassion and reduction of ethical “slippage,” as well as thinking from the bottom up, access to a rhetorically persuasive vocabulary, and potentially useful legal advantages. Copyright AESS 2013

Keywords: Human rights; Ethics; Relativism; Inquiries; Tribunals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s13412-013-0143-y (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:jenvss:v:3:y:2013:i:4:p:416-420

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/13412

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-013-0143-y

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences is currently edited by Walter A. Rosenbaum

More articles in Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences from Springer, Association of Environmental Studies and Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().