Rights-Based Ethics : Foundations and Applications

Abstract

Rights-based ethics offer a conceptual framework to address the complex ethical issues of our time. This volume combines systematic and historical perspectives on rights-based ethics with discussions of a broad range of topics in applied ethics to assess the achievements and limits of rights-based approaches. The normative concepts of fundamental human rights and human dignity play an essential role in considerations about global justice and international politics. However, these concepts have not been taken up sufficiently in the standard approaches to normative ethics. This volume contends that rights-based approaches in ethics not only offer a theoretical framework to explain complex normative concepts, but they can also offer answers to some of today’s most complex moral questions. First, the book addresses the conceptual and foundational questions of rights-based ethics. Second, it offers historical and cultural perspectives on rights. Third, it explores how rights-based ethics can address applied issues related to climate change, health systems, global supply chains, and the finance industry. This volume will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working in ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of law, and the social sciences. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 4.0 International license. This publication was made possible by generous support of the Open Access-monograph funds of the university library of the TU Darmstadt and by generous support of the Institute for Philosophy I at the Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Research of the Ruhr-University Bochum.