The paper examines the discourse-theoretic approach to human rights in a diverse world. In contrast to a “moralizing” conception of human rights as a set of fixed moral rights that can be determined independently of collective deliberation in a public sphere, discourse ethics seeks to promote a discursive approach and intercultural dialogue. Attention is paid to Jürgen Habermas’s theory, drawing a fine line between Western and non-Western concepts and between the universal meaning of human rights and the local conditions of their realization. Through a reflection on the pragmatics of protest Rainer Forst uncovers the idea of moral personhood and the related concept of a universal right to justification regarding official coercion. Seyla Benhabib’s basic assumption is that all human beings are capable of “communicative freedom”. This implies a fundamental moral “right to have rights.” The paper examines the difficulties involved in moving from a speech-act immanent norm to a claim regarding a basic moral principle, and then moving from a moral principle to the content of human rights as a set of rights and liberties. Human rights are viewed as the universal criteria for the evaluation and the possible critique of any society, including a democratic one. These rights are also enabling conditions, in the legal and political sense, of free democratic iterations among the peoples and cultures of the world.

The Kantian notion of sublime is taken to be a dynamic kind of feeling that human beings can experiment on/with. For example, when an alpinist is on a mountain, alone, at a snowy edge, close to the peak he wants to conquer or when he watches a sunrise; in these moments the alpinist realizes how wonderful the nature is, how incredible the world is, and he realizes that only a thin line separates that feeling from death. There is just a void over that edge, a scary fall for hundreds of meters. This paper suggests that the sublime is a consequence of the approach, through these kinds of activities, to the environment; a feeling that provides us with knowledge of the limitless and, most importantly, a knowledge of our human condition. In the mountaineering, as in other kinds of physical, exploratory activities, the sublime is possible due to the physical skill and the power of decision and adaptation to the hazards of being in an extreme situation. This paper also shows how, through these kinds of activities, the sublime is maintained in confrontation with the western “society of simulation” and the ideas of virtual experience and “safe experience”.

Human rights are conceived moral response of humanity to the experiences of gross violations of human rights. Yet, almost in every case we come across with such violations, we also witness a common and disturbing tendency to overshadow the arguments from human rights. Hence, human rights are not able to fulfill the very function we expect of them in the most pertinent cases. In our view, this is because of the mindset of the “political” that competes with the mindset of human rights for guiding human practices. This paper evaluates these two mindsets so as to show how spoiling impacts the mindset of the “political” has against the standpoint of human rights. We will then conclude that, if we are to hold out on the triumph of “the political” over human rights in the very cases, whereby we need appealing to human rights at most, we should renounce the main vestige of “the political” within international and national legal-normative frameworks. This vestige is principally the idea of “sovereignty”, which is the arch and peak concept of the mainstream political imaginary.

Humanitarian agencies have confronted one disaster after another over the last twenty-five years. Decades of intense growth in reacting to complex global calamities have seriously affected humanitarian efforts. Contending organizations – NGOs, states – engage in transnational interventions. From regions of natural disaster to sectors marked by political clashes, a new rationale for intervention has appeared which merges humanitarian assistance and military engagement. Humanitarian intervention sanctions the notion that military power is a necessary part of the responsibility to protect. The imperative to safeguard lives in jeopardy results in a form of humanitarian and military government in constant motion from one disaster to the next. Under the mandate of the right to intervene, this tactic confronts state sovereignty, particularly since humanitarian organizations engage in political activities such as establishing respect for human rights. The relation between military and humanitarian intervention in the context of disaster, is founded on a calculus of security, based in the legitimacy of measures meant to safeguard human life. A new form of humanitarian governance is thus emerging from military occupations and natural disasters. This paper will examine the human rights consequences of these states of disaster and the novel form of government associated with them.

The UN General Assembly has adopted without vote the UN Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training on December 19, 2011. For the first time, the international community has created a specific legal instrument on human rights education. The member-states declared the intention to be more active in human rights education and training. The Declaration defines as one aim of human rights education and training “to empower (…) to contribute to the building and promotion of a universal culture of human rights” (article 2/1). The concept of a universal culture of human rights can be found in other human rights documents and contexts of the human rights discourse as well. The question arises what the meaning of this concept is. The paper will discuss the concept of a universal culture of human rights. It will analyze the interplay between law and ethos-building in a society in relation to a universal culture of human rights. Beyond that, the role of human rights education for a “universal culture of human rights” will be examined.

Gramsci has been regarded as one of the most important critical intellectuals in the 20th century, and Vico as one of the most important philosophers of Italy. In this paper, I introduce Gramsci’s critical reflections on Vico, because they have not widely circulated. In these reflections, Gramsci remained profoundly unimpressed by Vico’s philosophy. He arrived at this conclusion by comparing ‘progressive’ intellectual traditions in France, Germany, and Britain while noting that in Italy a tradition comparable to those in Britain [political economists], France [enlightenment philosophers] and Germany [philosophy of history] was absent. I argue in this paper that Gramsci’s rejection of Vico offers an opportunity to rethink the relations between ‘national political theory’ and ‘international political theory’: for what Vico offered at the beginning of ‘modernity’ is a blueprint of the principle of the right to violence-less-ness not only in ‘national political theory,’ but also in ‘international relations theory.’ In other words, while predominant ‘modern political philosophers’ in the English, French, and German traditions promoted the right to violence-less-ness in ‘national law,’ in international law and international relations theory they maintained a principle of violence. To this day predominant international theories disregard the right to violence-less-ness by adhering to the principle and the facts of ‘just war theory.’ Vico had begun a discourse over three hundred years ago which had been by-passed by the prestige and influence of transatlantic political theories framed in the category of the ‘national.’ However, over the past decade or so, theories and institutions of global justice have emerged which attest to the prescience of Vico’s contributions to the evolution of a concept of human rights to violence-less-ness beyond national borders.

It is not possible to refuse the obvious condition that in complex societies law as ideology adds important values to the knowledge of contemporary problems. Here, we will understand ideology as the proposal of independent moral principles as “good life” in Dworkin’s terms. In his article in the New York Review of Books (2011), the author declares that “moral standards prescribe how we ought to treat others; ethical standards, how we ought to live ourselves. The happiness that Plato and Aristotle evoked was to be achieved by living ethically”. In our proposal, we will submit to the debate this theory of good life applied to the great problems of excluded social groups in large cities and how Law is able to politicize the themes of Human Rights in peripheral societies. I will establish that good life and living ethically is possible even in excluded conditions. In resume, I will apply some of Dworkin’s statements in his book Justice for Hedgehogs, where he tries to find some conceptions of what it is to “live well”. Since for him morality should not depend on any benefit that being moral might bring, it must be categorical. We are forced to reinterpret this view once a good life is required to face perverse human conditions of social justice.

Human rights, which are the natural/fundamental rights of every human being, are denied to Dalits in India. The paper discusses who Dalits are, their social status and the historical cause for the denial of human rights; An important and suitable case study will be presented to prove how Dalits are exploited and denied decent life in a democratic country. The constitution of India in its preamble ensures justice, liberty, equality and fraternity to all its citizens. Every democratic country and civilized society recognizes and guarantees the value of dignity and equality to all its members. Unfortunately, in India human life and human dignity have been disregarded today. For centuries in India social gradation based on castes is a permanent uncrossable set up. Ironically, the Hindu religion has sanctioned some castes the “natural superiority”. This has compelled the oppressed castes to fight for their rights and their right place in the society. The knowledge of their oppression and the conspiracy of their “lower place” in the gradation have come to Dalits through the education system introduced by the British during their rule. The Scheduled Castes (untouchable castes) adopted the nomenclature Dalit as a symbol that denotes revolution and change. Dalits believe in humanism. But the fundamental Hindu social system has determined to destroy Dalit as a human being Dalit rights are human rights. Dalits demand their share in all systems of their country, whether they are social, economic or political. Dalits have lost their dignity, life and lively hood in the caste system - and all Dalit movements should strive to regain the lost human personality by working strongly to eliminate this obnoxious system.

In this paper, the author addresses the problem of the human right to health - one of socioeconomic rights for which states accept an obligation under international law. The right to health is one of the most controversial human rights. In search of its justification, the author concerns: the Kantian concept of dignity; vital needs and Rawls’s theory of justice. In the following, it is discussed the difference between the approach to global health based on the humanitarian aid on the human rights. In response to criticism of the right to health based on the conviction that it has very wide scope, the conception of core concept is proposed. The author is convinced that the right to health is a basic and essential part of the modern human rights system.

In today’s world the growth potential of freedom with its resulting risks and responsibilities can be found in three major interrelated areas of globalization, epistemization and humanization. Our analysis is based on the idea of freedom as a personality’s value, viewed as an individual self-determination towards the most valuable of all possible choices. Globalization provides a general access to collective achievements and introduces new opportunities for development at a global, personal and local level (we call this phenomenon “glocapersonalization”). Epistemization presupposes that leadership positions in society are taken by individuals with what we call as “K-knowledge”; i.e., knowledge and competencies that are key to the advancement of society. We maintain that to implement K-knowledge such individuals ought to possess high ethical standards. Finally, humanization is the ongoing recognition, ideologically and practically of the priority of human dignity and the value of each and every individual. The advancement of human rights is rooted in the implementation of freedom opportunities in all the three areas but mostly agrees with humanization processes. As a result, humanization today needs developing meta-principles, embracing a variety of local value-regulatory systems. Our claim is that the umbrella meta-principles should be those of humanity, justice and tolerance.

In 1983 President Raúl Alfonsín created the Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP), a commission to investigate the crimes against humanity for what happened in Argentina during the Dictadura Militar (Military Dictatorship) occurred in 1976. No doubt, it was the most flagrant attack against human rights in our country. The members of Conadep gathered testimonies and reports of disappearances, abductions and torture that the military government had carried out during the years of lead. With all those testimonies a document was written, Nunca más, prefaced by Ernesto Sabato, and led to the Trial of the Juntas Militares in 1985. However, in recent years we are attending a turn of story of the Human Rights. There are many signs. The prologue of Nunca más was censored, the veracity of the number of testimonies collected by Conadep was questioned, some information about victims was modified, and so on. Thus, the changing story modified the meaning of memory for Conadep from memory to seek justice into memory to get revenge.

It has been claimed that several of the rights in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) - in particular the social and economic rights to the provision of welfare in, for example, education - cannot literally be rights of everybody. We find two main lines of analysis that have been raised to back up this claim. (i) One of these lines is theoretical or normative in nature. Here I take up Onora O’Neill’s concern with the counterpart obligations that attach to the UDHR social and economic rights. She argues that these obligations do not have a universal character and cannot backstop universal moral rights. I suggest ways around her argument. (ii) The other main line concerns feasibility. Here I take up the argument that the UDHR social and economic rights apparently cannot, under existing conditions, be fulfilled at even a minimal level for millions upon millions of people. James Nickel, well aware of this problem, argues that these rights nonetheless do not, on grounds of infeasibility, fail of universality. I try to counter his argument. But I add, in conclusion, that these pressing practical problems with the UDHR welfare rights could possibly be removed in time, with concentrated effort.

The relation between human rights and the rule of law has been a tricky one. Still, today’s constitutional democracies rely upon human rights and the rule of law. Additionally, the UN has been promoting the rule of law officially since 1992. Despite having theoretical difficulties relating to this matter, some practices of the UN enable us to concretise human rights norms and thus make easier to hold States accountable for their acts. This paper deals with one of those practices, namely setting human rights indicators, and it questions the function of indicators as a tool for assessing the accountability and the rule of law.

A restrictive interpretation of the principle of autonomy in terms of “personhood” or “normative agency” restrains the extension of human rights (deflation) and ends up being counterintuitive when accounting for people with a severely handicapped biopsychic capacity, yet who are still susceptible to the recognition of their rights. The normative agency criterion is insufficient so the “needs” criterion that expands the breadth of human rights (inflation) is proposed as a more radical approach in that the proper valuation of autonomy entails the assessment of the conditions necessary for its full realization.

With the rise of human rights and international courts, the universal rights have become a lingua franca of legitimation theory, while remaining unfounded, and thus function in the role of an unfounded foundation, founding the other rights without themselves needing to be founded. The right to life in particular is reckoned as one of the most fundamental rights by, for example, ECtHR. This article addresses the foundations and fundamentality of the right founded on individual life itself. In the landmark euthanasia case Pretty v. UK (ECHR 2346/02) the right to life was interpreted as an inalienable right to persistence of the subject as opposed to her will to self-determination. This interpretation, we demonstrate that it necessitates a metaphysical distinction of the subject from the bodily individual, a distinction that rises in the classical philosophy simultaneously with the question of unfounded foundations. Examining the backgrounds of abstraction of subject in the simultaneous development of new foundations of science and law in classical philosophy, we aim to reveal the problems implied in this concept of subject and in the fundamental right based on it.

Purpose - The aim of this paper is to search for values and ethics embedded in the philosophy of the Gita, and to explore if these can be applied to management, to solve a contemporary problem, identified and defined as -- The Problem: Which philosophy, if any, is complete and adequate in itself to be applied in the areas of values and ethics to management, such that it can transform the individual (manager) and reform the society (organization), leading to economic prosperity? Approach - The approach is a conceptual one, where philosophy as historically, contemporarily and popularly applied to management in the form of applied values and ethics, is examined, arguing a case for the Gita, as a solution. Findings - The Gita is found to be a poorna philosophy which is complete and adequate in itself, passes the tests of Perenniality, Completeness, Adequacy and Practicality, and can be applied to management, using the values and ethics embedded in it, to solve the Problem, proposing the solution as -- The Solution: Conform (to the Gita) <> Transform (the Individual/Manager) <> Reform (the Society/Organization)

In this paper I attempt to uncover the concept of alienation in M. K. Gandhi’s seminal work, the Hind Swaraj. It is my contention that there is an implicit notion of alienation that informs the whole of Hind Swaraj, which is, to some extent, similar to the concept of alienation found in Karl Marx’s thought. The Gandhian and Marxian concepts seem to have affinity and seem to share the same critical, diagnostic spirit, since they are employed for the same purpose, namely as keys to understanding (and overcoming) the ills of modern civilization. However, as far as I know, although Gandhi and Marx have been compared in numerous books and papers, there have been no at­tempts to read the Hind Swaraj as presenting a Marxian-looking concept of alienation. So I propose to do that here. I would first delineate the Marxian concept of alienation (section 1). I would then try to make explicit the implicit Gandhian notion of alienation (section 2). I would then turn to comparing the two concepts (section 3). This comparative study would show that a Gandhian way to a non-alienated state is to make constant use of one’s “hands and feet” (a favourite phrase of Gandhi’s), whereas a Marxian way seems to regard the non-alienated state as something to be achieved once and for all.

Madhyamika School originated with the teacher Arya Nagarjuna in the 2nd century CE. A galaxy of thinkers such as Aryadeva (3rd century CE), Buddhapalita (5th century CE), Bhavaviveka (5th century CE), Candrakrits (6th century CE), and Santiveda (7th century CE) followed Arya Nagarjuna. The Madhyamika-karika, written by Arya Nagarjuna, is the masterpiece. It represents in a systematic way the philosophy of the Madhyamika school. It says that sunyata (the indescribable absolute) is the absolute. There is no difference between sansara and nirvana. Nagarjuna gives the fundamentals of his philosophy in a nutshell. He describes Paticca Samuppada by means of eight negatives: “There is neither origination, nor cessation; neither permanence nor impermanence; neither unity nor diversity; neither coming in nor going out in the law of Paticca Samuppada.” There is only non-origination which is equivalent to sunyata. Thus this paper is analyzing the theory of Paticca Samuppada from the point of view of Theravada Buddhism.

Evidently, while reading The Life Divine along with Sri Aurobindo’s other writings on yoga and several scriptures of Āgamic/Tantric origin, one may discern that there can be yet another more comprehensive universe of discourse—referring to the domain beyond mental level, signifying the higher aspects of the multidimensional vastness of real world—where mundane morality simply fails to retain its further utility. Moral injunctions are assignable only to the transitional stage of evolution i.e. humans as mental beings. Such injunctions do not apply to two spheres of evolution, viz. the infra-ethical and the supra-ethical. Ethics is applicable, exclusively to the world of human beings organizing their lives in the level of mind. Nevertheless, this world of mental beings signifies an intermediate transitional stage of evolution. There is a higher and fundamental dimension of reality—beyond the world of duality—wherein categories and dichotomy of ethics remain simply inappropriate. Such wonderful domain of existence transcends the status of moral being. Briefly, the present paper identifies and deals with the realms of inappositeness of moral codes and categories within the integral philosophy of Sri Aurobindo.

My motivation for writing this paper comes from a continuing concern with the role of yoga philosophy in our stress. In today’s world man has become restless. Competition is in every profession. Doctors, engineers, scientists, scholars, philosophers and all professionals have created manifold problems. They feel always stress. Science is a great panacea and curative agent for de-stressing therapies, but it has not found an appropriate remedy answer. In these cases, yoga helps to answering many of these questions related to the health of the human body and mind. Maharsi Patanjali was the founder of the most well-known body – mind harmonizing science of India. He stated that the term yoga implies the communion of the petty self with the higher universal self. Patanjali discloses secrets of bringing under control the divergent characteris­tics, variations and modifications vrittis of the mind. He describes eight steps of Yoga for total health & peace of mind and these are sanskrit yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana and samadhi. These eight steps include both the spiritual and physical aspects of curative therapy among human beings. These give us physical, psychological as well as mental benefits most importantly stress reduction. Hence in this conflict- ridden world of today, the philosophy and practice of yoga is one of the most effective relief techniques.