1.1 Law, Morality and Politics: intersecting spheres
2.2 Conceptions of rights and the challenge of legitimacy
2. UTILITARIANISM
2.1. Utilitarianism and consequentialism
2.2. Defining and maximising 'Utility'
2.3. The Politics of Utilitarianism
2.4. Utilitarian Justifications of Rights: virtues and flaws
3. LIBERTARIANISM
3.1. Libertarianism and market freedom
3.2 Robert Nozick's Theory of Entitlement and the Self-Ownership
Argument
3.3 Institutional Implications: The negative conception of rights
and the priority of property rights
4. LIBERAL EGALITARIANISM
4.1. Justice and Impartiality: John Rawls' Project
4.2. Justice and Equality: Ronald Dworkin's Theory
4.3. Institutional implications: liberal rights and the politics
of egalitarianism; the welfare state and social rights
5. THE LIMITS OF LIBERAL JUSTICE: COMMUNITARIANISM,
MULTICULTURALISM, FEMINISM
5.1 Communitarianism: the social thesis and the common good
5.2. Multiculturalism and differentiated citizenship. Redistribution
vs. Recognition
5.3. Feminist conceptions of justice. Gender discrimination, structural
inequalities and status hierarchies. A critique of liberal views
of rights and equality
5.4. Equality between persons and equality between groups. Institutional
implications: The justification of cultural and social rights.
6. BEYOND JUSTICE AND RIGHTS: MARXISM
7.1. Analytical Marxism
7.2. Central Concepts: Explotation, Needs, Alienation
7.3. The critique of liberal society and liberal rights
7.4. Institutional implications: the marxist society
READINGS
Basic reading
Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy. An Introduction. Second Edition. Oxford University Press, 2002.
Requested readings for particular sessions (only selected pages to be indicated)
Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue. The Theory and Practice of
Equality, Harvard University Press, 2000
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, 1971.
Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship. A Liberal theory of
Minority Rights, Clarendon University Press, 1995.
Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and "the politics of recognition",
Harvard University Press, 1992.
Gerald A. Cohen, If you are Egalitarian, how come you are so rich?,
Harvard University Press, 2000
Susan M. Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family, Basic Books, 1989.
Allan Gewirth, The Community of Rights, The University of Chicago
Press, 1996.
Stephen Holmes, Cass Sunstein, The Cost of Rights. Why Liberty
depends on Taxes, New York, Norton and Company, 1999.
OBJECTIVES
The discourse of rights is a pervasive feature of contemporary liberal democracies. Different types of groups articulate their claims in the language of rights in order to preserve what they see as primary goods that the state needs to protect as a matter of justice. The evolution of the recognition and protection of individual rights in both the domestic and the international legal orders can be seen as the institutional implementation of such demands. Yet the relation between social justice and rights is controversial and poses significant questions that need to be addressed. In which sense law, morality and politics are intersecting spheres? What is the meaning of "human rights" as a legal concept? More centrally, how can the different generations of rights be morally justified?
This course will address these and other fundamental questions through examining the basic contributions of different theories of justice and assessing their impact in the constitutional spheres of democratic states and in the recent evolution of international human rights doctrines. In light of this framework we will also assess jurisprudential cases that represent contemporary controversies related with different perspectives and models of social justice - i.e. debates over the limits of property rights, the constitutional protection of social rights, cultural rights and the case for the islamic foulard, etc. The course seeks to give students an overview of the basic theories of justice and make them familiar with their potential institutional implications for current debates concerning individual rights.