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release name: Which.Rights.Should.Be.Universal.eBook-EEn

release date: 04.22.07

size: 2.06 MB

author: William J. Talbott

title: Which Rights Should Be Universal

ISBN: 0195331346 ?FORMAT: PDF ?category/genre: Philosophy

release notes/summary (backcover information)

"We hold these truths to be self-evident..." So

begins the U.S. Declaration of Independence. What

follows those words is a ringing endorsement of

universal rights, but it is far from self-evident.

Why did the authors claim that it was? William

Talbott suggests that they were trapped by a

presupposition of Enlightenment philosophy: That

there was only one way to rationally justify

universal truths, by proving them from self-

evident premises. With the benefit of hindsight,

it is clear that the authors of the U.S.

Declaration had no infallible source of moral

truth. For example, many of the authors of the

Declaration of Independence endorsed slavery.

The wrongness of slavery was not self-evident;

it was a moral discovery. In this book, William

Talbott builds on the work of John Rawls, Jurgen

Habermas, J.S. Mill, Amartya Sen, and Henry Shue

to explain how, over the course of history, human

beings have learned how to adopt a distinctively

moral point of view from which it is possible to

make universal, though not infallible, judgments

of left and wrong. He explains how this

distinctively moral point of view has led to the

discovery of the moral importance of nine basic

rights. Undoubtedly, the most controversial issue

raised by the claim of universal rights is the

issue of moral relativism. How can the advocate

of universal rights avoid being a moral

imperialist? In this book, Talbott shows how to

defend basic individual rights from a universal

moral point of view that is neither imperialistic

nor relativistic. Talbott avoids moral imperialism

by insisting that all of us, himself included, have

moral blindspots and that we usually depend on

others to help us to identify those blindspots.

Talbott's book speaks to not only debates on human

rights but to broader issues of moral and cultural

relativism, and will interest a broad range of

readers.

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