INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Human Rights – Critical Perspectives

Societas Ethica’s 60th Annual Conference 2024
August 22–25 2024, Uppsala/Sigtuna, Sweden

Human Rights – Critical Perspectives

Human rights are rightly regarded as a remarkable development in modern politics and law. The idea that states have legally recognized duties toward individuals indicates a break with most traditional approaches to politics that view individuals as duty-holders and states as legitimate authorities. Thus, every time human rights are taken seriously, they restrain the exercise of power by dominant groups and therefore risk provoking their resistance. Strategies for such resistance are many and they vary between contexts. One such strategy is to interpret human rights as being defined by majoritarian cultures and in so doing transform them into an ideology of domination over minorities. Another strategy is to reduce human rights to positive law, yet another is to claim that human rights is nothing but a moralistic rhetoric used to serve realpolitik.

To critically approach these strategies is a matter of both political agency and academic research. Ethicists, political theorists, and legal scholars work on human rights in order to discriminate between interpretations of human rights that contribute to liberation and democracy on the one hand and interpretations that devaluate human rights as a progressive political project on the other hand.

Societas Ethica invites ethicists to its annual conference in Uppsala 2024, devoted to human rights.

The conference Human Rights – Critical Perspectives aims to scrutinize contemporary approaches to human rights and to evaluate critical potential of theories that acknowledge the ambiguity of human rights as both an instrument of liberation and ideology of power. Traditionally, critique of human rights voiced by scholars, activists, or politicians would provoke a straightforward defense of human rights morality and law. Our aim is rather to promote theoretical developments within the field of human rights by utilizing some particular forms of critique of human rights.

Contemporary understandings of human rights in Europe continue to evolve in response to multiple unfolding events, including human migration, the rise of illiberal governments which leverage fear of racial, religious and ethnic difference, and the phenomenon of climate change and efforts to understand the requirements of living sustainably.

Keynote-Speakers and Panelists (among others):

• Michelle Becka, Professor of Christian Social Ethics, Würzburg University.

• Michael Goodhart, Professor of Political Science and of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, University of Pittsburgh.

• Lena Halldenius, Professor of Human Rights, Lund University.

• Elena Namli, Professor of Theological Ethics, Uppsala University.

• Andrea Sangiovanni, Professor of Philosophy, King’s College London.

Prof. Dr. Michelle Becka
Professor of Christian Social Ethics, Würzburg University

Whose criticism of what?
Ethical reflection on postcolonial and decolonial criticism of human rights
A norm does not become wrong because reality deviates from it. However, if the effectiveness of norms cannot be experienced at all, this norm loses considerable credibility and persuasiveness. For many people in the Global South, this is the case with regard to human rights. This leads to various forms of criticism. I will trace some of the lines of postcolonial and decolonial criticism in my presentation. They are located in the areas of tension between freedom and equality, individuality and collectivity and lead to the question of the subject of human rights. The thesis will be that critical questions from the Global South can uncover and remedy misinterpretations of human rights and ultimately defend the emancipatory claim of human rights for all.

Michelle Becka is a theologian and ethicist. She is a professor of Christian Social Ethics at the University of Wuerzburg, Germany. Her research focuses on ethics in the prison system, ethics and human rights, fundamental question of social ethics, ethics of migration, interculturality and Latin American theology.

Michael Goodhart
Professor of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh

The Human Rights Project and the Limits of Cosmopolitan Rights
How and why did human rights become so contentious? In this talk I argue that the complexity and multiplicity of human rights have been obscured in the shadow of the Human Rights Project—the global advancement of an international regime of legalized human rights and humanitarianism built on liberal economic, political, and philosophical foundations, anchored in the UN system, and backed by the militarized and soft power of liberal democratic capitalist states and their corporate, philanthropic, and international NGO partners. In and through the Human Rights Project, human rights have been configured as cosmopolitan: as natural, universal, transcendent, liberal, and juridical. I show how this cosmopolitan conception of human rights was normalized in the 1990s and argue that the most intractable debates over human rights—debates about their origins, their universality, and their political character—perdure because of a mistaken but ubiquitous assumption about the singularity of this cosmopolitan conception of rights.

Michael Goodhart is Professor of Political Science, Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and Philosophy (by courtesy) at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Injustice: Political Theory for the Real World (Oxford 2018), Democracy as Human Rights: Freedom and Equality in the Age of Globalization (Routledge 2005), and some three dozen articles and chapters on human rights, democracy, injustice, responsibility, accountability, and related topics. He was a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in 2021-22 and a Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow in Berlin in 2008-09.

Lena Halldenius
Professor of Human Rights Studies, Lund University

Human rights as levers for equality
A theoretical exploration of human rights needs to attend to three things: the extension of human rights (what rights are there (in the world)?), the concept (what is a human right?), and the rationale for thinking in these terms at all (what is the point of human rights, what do we want human rights to do in the world, and under what circumstances does the issue arise?). An exploration of this kind is inevitably normative, but should be empirically informed and incorporate social as well as philosophical analysis. I also suggest that the third question is, or should be, logically prior to the other two, and that lack of proper attention to it is a shortcoming that afflicts quite a lot of human rights theorizing. In this talk, I will approach these questions from a particular account of freedom – freedom as non-domination. On this perspective, the point of human rights is – in negative terms – to end exploitation, vulnerability and precarity, and – in positive terms – to establish a society of equals in a free political culture. From this I will infer a concept of human rights as powers to act and suggest that rights theory needs to do away with the minimalism to which it is often committed and instead conceive of rights as levers for equality.

Lena Halldenius is a philosopher and lawyer. She is professor of Human Rights Studies at Lund University and coordinates the university’s profile area Human Rights. Her research lies within analytical political philosophy and early modern history of political thought. One of her current projects concerns socioeconomic injustice on the digitized payment market.  

Andrea Sangiovanni
Professor of Philosophy, King’s College London

Human Rights as a Social Kind
Suppose two interlocutors disagree about the nature of human rights. One says that they are moral rights possessed by everyone in virtue of their humanity, and the other says they are not moral, but legal rights established through international conventions. What makes this kind of disagreement meaningful? Why isn't this just an instance of a verbal dispute, where the appearance of genuine disagreement is illusory and quickly resolved? Answering questions like these raises a difficult set of issues in conceptual ethics—namely, about the standards we should use in deciding which concepts to use and when to use them. I will argue that we should conceive of human rights as a social kind. Disagreement is most meaningful when and because it is about a significant set of social practices that together define and articulate a set of moral standards for political conduct. Disagreement should not center, then, on ordinary usage in a linguistic community, or on whether and which natural rights exist; rather, it should center on human rights as a social phenomenon. I show how conceiving of human rights in this way can illuminate what seem like intractable disagreements between Orthodox, Political, and Legal Conceptions of human rights. We should ask: What is human rights talk _for_ before we can answer what human rights _exist_ or what human rights _are_. I trace some of the implications of this shift for how to go about justifying and designing systems of human rights.

 Andrea Sangiovanni is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. From 2018-2020, he was Professor of Social and Political Theory at the European University Institute, Fiesole. He is also the author of Humanity without Dignity: Moral Equality, Respect, and Human Rights (Harvard University Press, 2017) and Solidarity: Nature, Grounds, and Value (forthcoming, Manchester University Press). He is also the recipient of a 5-year ERC Consolidator Grant entitled 'Solidarity in Europe’ (EUSOL).