Browsing by Author "Buchanan, Allen E"
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Item Open Access A Dialogical Approach to Human Rights: Institutions, Culture and Legitimacy(2009) Hlavac, Monica AnneIn this study I address the moral and cultural disagreement and conflict regarding the interpretation of human rights norms that threatens the legitimacy of the human rights enterprise. Such disagreements present an opportunity to probe, question and dissect beliefs to uncover inconsistencies and false assumptions and attain a deeper insight into human rights norms that are presently left in a rather abstract form in international human rights documents and conventions.
I describe and defend an institutionally-driven dialogical approach that promises to systematically address these moral and cultural disagreements. My approach rests on two claims. First, clearer content for human rights norms will emerge from within particular cultures if critical cultural and moral investigation through dialogue is encouraged. By engaging in dialogical processes, we not only discharge our obligation to aid in a process that leads to a fair specification of human rights norms, but we also come to understand how human rights norms are, at their very core, participative.
Second, one way that international human rights institutions (IHRIs) can legitimately fulfill their function of supporting human rights is by encouraging critical moral investigation through dialogue. I make this proposal more concrete by discussing the case law on the issue of transsexuals that has come before the European Court of Human Rights.
Item Open Access Global Health: A Normative Analysis of Intellectual Property Rights and Global Distributive Justice(2007-05-07T19:06:56Z) DeCamp, Matthew WayneIn the past several years, the impact of intellectual property rights (IPRs) on access to medicines and medical technologies has come under increased scrutiny. Motivating this are highly publicized cases where IPRs appear the threaten access to particular medicines and diagnostics. As IPRs become globalized, so does the controversy: In 1998, nearly forty pharmaceutical companies filed a lawsuit against South Africa, citing (among other issues) deprivation of intellectual property. This followed South Africa’s implementation of various measures to enable and encourage the use of generic medicines – a move that was particularly controversial for the newly available (and still patented) HIV medicines. While many historical, legal, economic, and policy analyses of these cases and issues exist, few explicitly normative projects have been undertaken. This thesis utilizes interdisciplinary and explicitly normative philosophical methods to fill this normative void, engaging theoretical work on intellectual property and global distributive justice with each other, and with empirical work on IPR reform. In doing so, it explicitly rejects three mistaken assumptions about the debate over IPRs and access to essential medicines: (i) that this debate reduces to a disagreement about empirical facts; (ii) that intellectual property is normatively justified solely by its ability to “maximize innovation”; and (iii) that this controversy reduces to irresolvable disagreement about global distributive justice. Calling upon the best contemporary approaches to human rights, it argues that these approaches lend normative weight in favor of reforming IPRs – both that they should be reformed, and how – to better enable access to essential medicines. Such reforms might include modifying the present global IPR regime or creating new alternatives to the exclusivity of IPRs, both of which are considered in light of a human right to access to essential medicines. Future work will be needed, however, to better specify the content of a right to “essential medicines” and determine a fair distribution of the costs of fulfilling it.Item Open Access Topics in Rational Choice Theory(2008-04-29) Akhtar, Sahar ZRational Choice theory includes a broad body of research that attempts to account for how people act in a variety of contexts, including economic, political and even moral situations. By proposing, most generally, that individuals rationally pursue their self-interests regardless of the context, rational choice has had extensive theoretical and empirical success, on the one hand, and has also faced wide criticism when applied in a variety of disciplines, on the other hand. While there is disagreement over what the defining assumptions of rational choice theory are, in this dissertation I focus on three on which there is widespread agreement. These three features of rational choice theory are: its assumption of egoism or self-interest as the central motivation of individuals; its reliance on consequences as part of a comparative decision-making framework; and finally, its focus on the individual and not on groups as the methodological and normative unit of analysis. In correspondence to these three features, my dissertation is divided into three parts and explores the separate topics of (I) egoism and altruism; (II) consequentialism and ethical decision-making; and, (III) individualism and group identity. The dissertation is not an exercise in showing the extensive problems of rational choice theory, although there are many. The dissertation rather engages these three topics with differing results, some of which in fact attempts to revitalize rational choice, or at least features of rational choice. For the part on altruism, my goal is to demonstrate why the central assumption of egoism in rational choice theory is problematic. More broadly, I argue for a different way of defining genuine altruistic motivation. A result of my analysis there is that altruism appears to be more widespread than has been traditionally assumed and is more amenable to empirical examination. For my discussion on consequentialism, my aim is to re-characterize rational choice as a mode of moral decision-making. I argue that the moral agent is one who frequently compares her particular moral ends in a stable fashion and for this reason cost-benefit analysis is a fully moral framework, one that encourages the agent to genuinely care for her ends and values. For the topic of individualism and group identity, my objective is to show how a previously dismissed topic, once unpacked, is fully consistent with rational choice theory and ought to be of interest to the rational choice theorist. I show that if the liberal political theorist, including the rational choice theorist, is to value group identity, the commitment is only limited to valuing a form of group identity--particularized identity--that is individualist in character.