RIGHTS, RESILIENCE, AND RESPONSIBILITY

• Published in: Emory law journal Vol. 71; no. 7; pp. 1435 - 1455
• Main Author: Fineman, Martha Albertson
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Atlanta Emory University, School of Law 01.01.2022
• Subjects: Human rights; Morality; Politics
• ISSN: 0094-4076; 2163-324X

[...]he offers an elegant, coherent, and comprehensive argument for appreciating existing international human rights doctrine and dicta as representing a moral code to guide governmental actions and individual lives.3 He sets out the following in the Introduction: My aim in this book is to clarify and interrogate the morality of human rights, by which I mean the morality embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and/or in one or more of the several international human rights treaties that have entered into force in the period since the adoption of the Universal Declaration, in 1948, by the UN General Assembly. In Interrogating the Morality of Human Rights, Michael considers the normative aspect of morality as resolved in the United Nations' process of drafting the various Human Rights Declarations and Conventions that form the texts for analysis.7 The implicit argument is that these documents should be accepted as a collectively constructed normative judgement on what constitutes morality.8 They present coherent, internally consistent standards for assessing moral action. [...]consistent with the manuscript's descriptive task, those issues are (at least implicitly) resolved by reference to the process that generated the human rights' canon.10 A. Sources of the Universal As briefly noted above, in Interrogating the Morality of Human Rights, the process of producing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other human rights documents serves to both articulate and justify a universal vision.11 The manuscript dutifully considers other sources for determining what unites us across our real and contrived differences in place, politics, position, and privilege. The claim is not based on the nature of the rights identified, but on the communal or universal scope of the political agreement or consent that produced and affirms these rights.14 The United Nations have come together to resolve the question of morality (at least for contemporary audiences), setting forth a consensus generated with integrity through a process that has been both inclusive and democratic.