Human Rights Ethics

<i>Human Rights Ethics</i> makes an important contribution to contemporary philosophical and political debates concerning the advancement of global justice and human rights. Butler's book also lays claim to a significant place in both normative ethics and human rights studies in as much as it seeks to vindicate a universalistic rational approach to human rights ethics. Butler's innovative approach is not based on murky claims to natural rights that supposedly hold wherever human beings exist; nor does it succumb to the traditional problems of justification associated with utilitarianism Kantianism and other procedural approaches to human rights studies. Instead Butler proposes a dialectical justification of human rights by indirect proof that claims not to be question begging. Very much in the spirit of Hegel and Habermas Butler proposes to vindicate a totally rational account of human rights but one that depends concretely and historically on a dialectically constructed right to freedom of thought in its universal modes.