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This chapter considers how human rights perspectives understand the gender/culture tension and the kinds of normative and practical solutions that they offer. In addition to discussing writing by feminist human rights scholars, it considers the work of philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who focuses on women’s capabilities for well-being, as well as the work of philosopher Onora O’Neill, who argues that we need to attend to the circumstances and capacities that women need if they are to genuinely give their consent to cultural practices and arrangements.

Onora O'Neill made several interesting contributions to the debates on international distributive justice in her 1986 book, ‘Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Justice, and Development’. This chapter outlines O'Neill's Kantian strategy for tackling the moral problems of international poverty and defends a human rights approach against her objections. There are, however, seemingly fatal problems with the Kantian approach that render it less useful than a rights-centered strategy for justifying judgements about global justice. This chapter also discusses the pros and cons of three central cosmopolitan theories of justice: utilitarianism, human rights theories, and O'Neill's maverick Kantianism. The chapter concludes that a theory of basic human rights is a plausible approach for the cosmopolitan to take to the problems of international distributive justice.

This chapter describes the evolution of the human rights discourse covering the time from the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 to the present. It discusses the impact of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Covenants and Conventions, and looks at the expansion in the domain of human rights to cover economic and social rights. It also talks about different conceptions of human rights, particularly of Amartya Sen and Onora O’Neill, and also the critiques such as the feasibility critique and the institutional critique, and allocation of obligations. This chapter points out how a number of considerations—adequacy of the law, robust institutionalization, enabling economic environment, accessible remedies—have to receive attention, for the rights-based approach to succeed,

This essay contrasts several versions of constructivism proposed by Onora Neill and John Rawls, and reviews critically O’Neill’s objections to Rawls’ theory of justice. O’Neill’s objections to Rawls also seem to implicate the author’s Kantian constructivist framework for normative ethics, but arguably neither this nor Rawls’ constructivisms need necessarily compete with O’Neill’s deepest aspirations for the constructive powers of reason.

The claim that there are natural rights, which exist before or outside of any ordered civil society and apart from any positively legal expression, has long been controversial. There is a tradition of scepticism about such rights, stretching at least from the late eighteenth century to the present day. This opening chapter expounds four eminent expressions of this ‘Sceptical Tradition’ in the thought of Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, David Ritchie, and Onora O’Neill. It concludes by distilling the tradition’ into a set of objections to natural rights-talk: its abstract character, which makes it impossible to evaluate and encourages political recklessness; its inflated rhetoric, which overlooks the moral importance of circumstances, especially feasibility; and its confusion of natural morality with legality. The subsequent four chapters then proceed to test these objections against natural rights-talk, first, in the pre-modern period (Chapter 2), second in the modern period (Chapter 3), third in modern Roman Catholic thought (Chapter 4), and finally as it comes from the pens of a selection of contemporary defenders (Chapter 5).

This chapter completes the testing of the Sceptical Tradition’s objections to natural rights, by examining the thought of a selection of contemporary thinkers, in addition to that of John Finnis (in Chapter 4). Those selected are Onora O’Neill (and in relation to her, John Tasioulas, Elizabeth Ashford, and Henry Shue), Nicholas Wolterstorff, and James Griffin (and in relation to him, Allen Buchanan). From this examination the conclusion is drawn that the arguments made by Shue, Tasioulas, Ashford, and Griffin fail to dislodge O’Neill’s ‘radical’ critique, namely, that where capable holders of feasible correspondent duties have not been identified, universal human rights are illusory. This implies that rights are contingent on the circumstances of feasibility and capability, and that there is no constant natural right. The chapter then proceeds to draw general conclusions from the testing of natural rights-talk in Chapters 2 to 5. One seminal conclusion is that the paradigm of a right is positively legal, commanding the support of such institutions as police and courts. This is what explains its distinctive authority vis-à-vis other claims. It follows that a natural right, existing apart from civil society and so lacking institutional support, is, at best, analogous to a proper, legal right. However, since the very concept of a right connotes the stability and security of a legal right, natural rights-talk misleads and is best avoided. Therefore, while there is natural right or law or morality, and while there are legal rights justified by natural morality, there are no natural rights.

Drawing on Onora O’Neill’s theories on human rights, this chapter examines how elements of her framing of the problem of human rights have been taken up in the literature on women’s human rights to health. It then argues that a major defect of O’Neill’s account is that it ignores the role that women’s human rights play in establishing women’s equal moral standing with men in their social and political communities, which is best captured by Pogge’s institutional account of human rights. It further argues that establishing women’s equal standing provides an institutional structure that fosters positive change in women’s health. This view of human rights can be grounded in Kant’s political philosophy, in particular the demand that we establish institutions that respect the equal freedom of individuals and avoid subordination

This chapter reinforces two of Shue’s principal arguments against the existence of a fundamental distinction between liberty rights and welfare rights, such that only the former are genuine human rights. The first argument is that the enjoyment of the right to subsistence is essential to the enjoyment of any other rights, and so has to be acknowledged as a basic human right. The second argument addresses the duties imposed by welfare rights. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 1 discusses Shue’s account of the interdependence between the right to subsistence and other rights. Section 2 argues for a substantive interdependence between them. Section 3 analyses the Kantian rationale for the claim that duties of justice must be perfect in nature, and that positive duties, unlike negative duties, cannot be general duties of justice. Section 4 discusses Onora O’Neill’s account of coercion, and argues that child labour plausibly constitutes coercion on this account. Section 5 argues that, because of the interdependence of the right against child labour and the right to subsistence, then unless the right to subsistence has been secured, the right against child labour is more plausibly seen as imposing imperfect duties. It concludes that the standard dichotomies between positive and negative duties are overly rigid.

This chapter argues that the compulsory norms of self-sacrificial ‘love’ in patriarchal forms of religious practice have undermined an appropriate confidence for both women and men; under patriarchy persons (in love) tend to exhibit either over- or under-confidence in their capacity to reason for themselves. Yet it is possible to cultivate ethical confidence on the basis of non-destructive identities; this cultivation of human identities in personal and social relations, in turn, restores ‘the capacity to adopt principles that could be adopted by all’ (O’Neill). The latter, ‘principled autonomy’, matters, if we are to overcome sex-gender oppression in our most intimate relations.

This chapter follows a suggestion, by Onora O’Neill, that Kant’s notion of autonomy should be interpreted neither in an anarchic “radical existentialist” way nor in terms of an authoritarian “panicky metaphysics.” It also develops her suggestion, in reacting to Iris Murdoch’s critique of Kant as anarchic and “Luciferian” in a bad Sartrian sense, that there is a way to read Sartre as, in part, a good Kantian. The chapter offers an extensive defense of Sartre’s “Existentialism as a Humanism” as a sensible existentialist version of Kantian ethics, and it also notes positive ethical connections between Milton and Kant. Empirical and transcendental notions of choice, and their “all or nothing” and “degree” aspects, are distinguished, and this distinction is used to vindicate Kant’s notion of freedom as also metaphysical but not in a “panicky” way.

This chapter presents a philosophical discussion of Immanuel Kant's Formula of Universal Law as an alternative to consequentialist reasoning. It first considers one version of Kant's Formula of Universal Law, known as the Impossibility Formula, which says it is wrong to act on maxims that could not be universal laws. It then examines Onora O'Neill's revised version of Kant's formula, that is: it is wrong to act on any maxim whose being successfully acted on by some people would prevent some other people from successfully acting on it. According to O'Neill, this formula condemns deception and coercion, since those who deceive or coerce others thereby ‘guarantee that their victims cannot act on the maxims they act on’. The chapter also explores Kant's Law of Nature Formula, Permissibility Formula, and Moral Belief Formula before concluding with an analysis of the notion that the agent's maxim determine whether some act is wrong.

Humean pluralism does a better job than its monistic rivals at explaining the morally significant phenomena of “agonizing decisions,” situations in which a person feels remorse about doing what she thinks is right and that feeling of remorse is an entirely appropriate response. For while monism implies that when a person facing an agonizing decision comes to think that a certain decision really is right she will no longer experience the situation as involving opposing moral forces, Humean pluralism implies that even if someone comes to think that one particular course of action is right she may continue to experience the situation as one that involves conflicting moral forces. This chapter also addresses a number of monistic objections to this argument for pluralism, such as those pressed by Ruth Barcan Marcus and Thomas Hurka.

Kant’s universalization test is illustrated and defended by reconstructing Kant’s argument to justify rights to usufruct (acquisition, possession and use of things), based on human autonomy and human finitude. The modal interpretation of Kant’s universalization test (advocated by O’Neill) is developed and defended in detail. Only rights to usufruct can be defended by appeal to natural law; rights to property require public legislation (positive law).