Rights-Based Ethics Foundations and Applications

PART 1 Introduction

Rights-Based Ethics: Outline of an Approach

PART 2 Conceptual and Foundational Questions

1 Why a Rights-Based Ethics?

2 Human Dignity as Absolute Inner Value and Moral Status

3 Reason and Moralities: The Prudential Foundations of Ethics in Alan Gewirth’s Procedural Rationalism

4 Proving a Categorical Imperative by the Possibility of Self-Contradiction: The Paradox of Method in a Critique of Practical Reason

5 Conceptual Tools for the Analysis of Rights

6 The Problem of Aggregation in a Rights-Based Moral Theory

7 What Do I Morally Owe to Myself?: On the Moral Right to Freedom and Duties to Oneself in Alan Gewirth’s Rights-Based Ethics

PART 3 Historical and Cultural Perspectives on Rights

8 Rights, Coercion, and the Will of the People: On the Relationship between Politics and Normativity in Marsilius of Padua

9 Do Immoralists Suffer a Loss of Meaning in Life?: A Focus on Gewirth’s Theory of Self-Fulfillment and Metz’s Fundamentality Theory

PART 4 Rights in Contexts of Applied Ethics

10 On a Freedom-Based Concept of Person and Its Bioethical Consequences

11 Moral Rights as Criteria for Professional Nursing Care

12 How Should One Respond to Climate Change?: A Rights-Based Ethical Theory’s Approach to the Problem

13 Standard Threats and (Mandatory) Human Rights Due Diligence in Global Supply Chains: On the Corporate Responsibility to Address Human Rights Abuses Committed by Third Parties

14 Rights-Based Risk Ethics: A Family Dispute

15 Balancing Rights While Protecting the Climate

16 Too Big to Fail Banks, Private Credit Creation, and Systemic Risks: Challenges of a Modern Ethics of Risk

PART 5 Outlook

17 On the Foundations and Implications of Moral Rights

Biography

Marcus Düwell is a Professor of Philosophy at Technical University Darmstadt, Germany. His research interests include foundational questions of moral and political philosophy, philosophical anthropology, bioethics, and climate ethics. His publications include the Cambridge Handbook on Human Dignity (2013) and Towards the Ethics of a Green Future (Routledge, 2018).

Johannes Graf Keyserlingk is a philosopher and social scientist who gained a PhD at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, in 2017. His research interests are political philosophy, digital ethics, and economic ethics.

Philipp Richter is a Professor of Philosophy at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Since 2019, he has held the Chair of Teaching Philosophy and Ethics at the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences. Richter has published books and papers on methods of teaching philosophy and on normative and applied ethics.

"In the intensity of its examination of the thesis that agent rights form the essential ground of morality, and in the scope and design of a practical ethics based upon it, this expert and critical collection provides invaluable analyses of rights in the context of climate change policy, ‘too big to fail’ banking, the crisis of health care, bioethical threats to freedom, and human rights abuses in corporate supply chains."

Stuart Toddington, University of Huddersfield, UK

"This is a remarkable text bringing together some of the best rights theorists at work today. In part it is a welcome continuation of the Gewirthean tradition in rights thinking. In part it is a radical attempt to ensure that rights theory speaks directly to contemporary problems and crises. This is an essential and powerful demonstration that human rights, as moral rights, contain the philosophical and practical resources to meet real problems in principled ways."

Stephen Riley, University of Leicester, UK