... …to deny the relevance of that general claim would be to miss something central about our social existence." Sen, p. ...
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In this chapter, "Culture and Human Rights," Sen attempts to clarify the relationship between the "language of freedom" and the "language of rights," since the assumption of his book is that freedom is a human right. While he examines development in terms of freedom (231), he realizes that he does so by assuming that freedom is the highest social good, defined by what Sen calls "capability," where "unfreedom" = "capability deprivation."
Perhaps the clearest statement of what Sen means by "freedom" occurs several times in the book, on p. ... Sen then goes on to elaborate his summary definitions with examples and discussion in the next three sections. ...
As Sen writes, this theory and its problems has a long (loooong ) intellectual history, however, Sen can present the difficulty in basic terms: " common to these ---and many other--- lines of critique is an insistence that rights must be seen in postinstitutional terms as instruments, rather than as prior ethical entitlement" ( 229). ... you have no "pre-legal moral claim" through which you can demand justice or legal enforcement.
Sen’s response is that an unmet demand for justice does not dispute the legitimacy of the demand or the basis upon which that demand is made (e. ... Sen supports his claim by citing examples where we find moral claims that "exceed the domain of potential legal rights," e. ...
Sen’s main task in this section is to divorce the legal from the ethical, in order to assert that there are legitimate moral claims and entitlements that exist outside and inside of the law. ... Is it possible for individuals to make appeals to justice above and often against their own state ?" (Robbins, 1999: 275)
As we will see later in Sen, the legitimacy critique also calls into question the relationship between social justice and legal justice. ... Sen bothers with Kantian philosophy because its basic assumption is so powerful: surely rights are understood in terms of the duties (obligations) that correspond to them. ...
Rather than take on all of Kantian philosophy, Sen addresses the problems such a critique poses:
First, he notes that looking for a responsible agent (the person or institution whose duty it is to protect or fulfill these rights) as proof that the right in question exists is most often a valid legal argument, but not a moral one. ...
Sen would claim that human rights exceed those granted by citizenship (the nation state) precisely on the grounds of this reasoned sense of moral obligation shared by humanity: "Human rights are seen as rights shared by all ---irrespective of citizenship---- the benefits of which everyone should have" (230). ...
Sen will refute (3) by taking a close look at (2); in the course of his analysis, he does not have to make a decision about the origin of values and ethical systems (1), because none of the claims he makes hinge on proving or disproving that premise.