Which Rights Should Be Universal?

By William Talbott

Book Overview

"We hold these truths to be self-evident..." So begins the U.S. Declaration of Independence. What follows those words is a ringing endorsement of universal rights, but it is far from self-evident. Why did the authors claim that it was? William Talbott suggests that they were trapped by a presupposition of Enlightenment philosophy: That there was only one way to rationally justify universal truths, by proving them from self-evident premises.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the authors of the U.S. Declaration had no infallible source of moral truth. For example, many of the authors of the Declaration of Independence endorsed slavery. The wrongness of slavery was not self-evident; it was a moral discovery.

In this book, William Talbott builds on the work of John Rawls, J rgen Habermas, J.S. Mill, Amartya Sen, and Henry Shue to explain how, over the course of history, human beings have learned how to adopt a distinctively moral point of view from which it is possible to make universal, though not infallible, judgments of right and wrong. He explains how this distinctively moral point of view has led to the discovery of the moral importance of nine basic rights.

Undoubtedly, the most controversial issue raised by the claim of universal rights is the issue of moral relativism. How can the advocate of universal rights avoid being a moral imperialist? In this book, Talbott shows how to defend basic individual rights from a universal moral point of view that is neither imperialistic nor relativistic. Talbott avoids moral imperialism by insisting that all of us, himself included, have moral blindspots and that we usually depend on others to help us to identify those blindspots.

Talbott's book speaks to not only debates on human rights but to broader issues of moral and cultural relativism, and will interest a broad range of readers.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195331346
• ISBN13: 9780195331349
• Release Date: June 2007
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A thoughtful account

Dr. Talbott's remarks on human rights balance philosophical concerns and the historical record adeptly. His emphasis on bottom-up processes for the devlopment of robust ethical conceptions yields some novel but well-grounded insights. I would recommend this book to anyone with a serious interest in ethics or social philosophy.

Good Book

In this volume, Talbott argues that the practice of securing a broad range of human rights would dramatically increase the well-being of the world's citizens, present and future. Moreover, and more interestingly, he argues that this increase provides the underlying justification for such rights. His position is a novel addition to the contemporary scene, dominated by non-consequentialist approaches like those of Rawls. Talbott clearly and effectively challenges Rawls's position in The Law of Peoples and, on the way, offers fascinating historical illustrations of moral progress and the psychological mechanisms that sustain or inhibit it. His response to Richard Rorty in the last chapter is also worth reading, although I found it somewhat less convincing.