Università Roma Tre

The locution "human rights" denotes a field of action as well as a broad, inter-disciplinary, field of studies. In the first perspective, human rights are generally meant to express a set of minimum standards of conduct a State ought to meet in the treatment of individuals over whom it exercises its jurisdiction. Since the end of World War II international charters, conventions, covenants and declarations have been promulgated stating what basic rights individuals have. Notable efforts have been made to enforce adherence to those rights resulting in the creation of a system of multi-level jurisdiction through a number of international courts. Even though many see human rights as a Western, culturally biased, construction based upon an abstract and atomistic conception of the individual, the notion that for a State to promote and perform cruel and degrading acts is unjust, albeit for different reasons, has become increasingly popular globally. In the second perspective, descriptively human rights are said to be powers or properties belonging to all human beings in virtue of being human. Normatively that all human beings must be able to enjoy certain fundamental rights is a matter of global justice. Today not only theories of human rights, concerned with guiding action, but also theories about human rights, concerned with foundational questions, compete with one another. The course concentreates on the theory of autonomy, vulnerability, recognition and justice by Axel Honneth. There is general agreement about the fact that liberal-democratic societies are based on normative principles, which require legal provisions to ensure that governments do not violate anyone’s fundamental rights. Yet, partially on account of the complexity of the ongoing overlapping global processes of integration, deregulation, reform, and partially on account of the influence of anti-foundational critique (deconstruction; postmodernism; relativism), these widely accepted principles seem to have lost much of their original explanatory and prescriptive force. Contrary to those claiming that this problem consists of a mere temporal delay between philosophical investigation and practical application Honneth argues that more is needed than time, hope and persistence to transform theoretically developed principles of freedom and justice into guidelines for political action. In his view the normative principles at the heart of the human rights discourse are formulated in a manner that prevents us from deriving guidelines for political action. In particular, the course will examine the model of normative reconstruction that Honneth developed in neo-Hegelian fashion for the purpose of situating his own theory of justice as recognition in the analysis of the variety of historically determined institutional instances and practices that embody existentially significant claims to realization.

CONTENT OF THE PROGRAMME -

PART I – Historical background, methodological approaches, perspectives and major issues

- Introduction and course description; theory of human rights and its historical background; ontology and epistemology in the theory of human rights
- Freedom, justice as fairness and the ethics of discourse. Rawls, Habermas and the challenges of the anti-foundational critique
- Identity, authenticity, recognition and otherness

PART II – The theory of autonomy, vulnerability, recognition and justice by Axel Honneth

- Situating Honneth; Hegelian roots; the fabric of justice
- The struggle for recognition and the moral grammar of social conflicts
- The right to freedom and the social foundation of democratic ethical life
- The reasons for the existence of legal and moral freedom and their pathologies respectively
- Social freedom and the three registers of the ‘We’ of personal relationships
- Autonomy, vulnerability, recognition and justice and the market: the sphere of consumption, the labour market and environmental sustainability
- The ‘We’ of democratic will-formation; Organized self-realization: paradoxes of individualization
- The work of negativity; the ‘I’ in ‘We’: recognition as driving force of group formation; recognition and ideology

This course is taught in English.

• Honneth, A., Freedom’s Right. The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (2011), trans. J. Ganahl, Polity Press, Cambridge 2014 (ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6943-4)
• Maiolo, F., Honneth’s Theory of Recognition (forthcoming publication: Apeiron Editori)