Rowan Cruft
Biographic Data
| ID | 1001401 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rowan Cruft |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rowan |
| FAMILY NAME | Cruft |
| SIGNATURE | CRUFT R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Stirling |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Moral powers and the moral community
First paragraph: Morality is clearly in some sense a human creation. The difficulty is: in what sense? Richardson's Articulating the Moral Community offers a partial answer to this question. He argues that the moral community can exercise a power to create moral changes: refinements of current moral principles can be generated through this power. Richardson uses the term ‘articulation’ in the engineer's sense, referring to a body that ‘has parts …
On Rights, Human Rights, and Property
This article responds to papers by Joseph Bowen, Simon May, Zofia Stemplowska, and Nick Sage, focused on my monograph, Human Rights, Ownership, and the Individual (OUP, 2019). The book develops a new account of the nature of rights: as duties governed by ‘addressive’ norms of first‐ and second‐personal thinking. This account has implications for both human rights and property rights. It implies that human rights in law should be founded on pre‐le…
Rethinking the Post‐Truth Polarisation Narrative
This article critically evaluates what we call the ‘popular narrative’ about the state of the public sphere. We identify three elements of this popular narrative (the post‐truth element, the polarisation element and the new technology element), and draw on philosophical work on hinge epistemology and social roles to challenge each one. We propose, instead, that public debate has always depended on non‐evidential commitments, that it has always be…
Human Rights, Ownership, and the Individual
What do we mean by rights, and can our use of the concept be justified? This book offers a partial vindication of the concept of a right, defending its use in relation to human rights while questioning it in relation to property. It starts with a new ‘Addressive’ account of the nature of rights as bringing together duty-bearer and right-holder first-personally—a theory which moves beyond and complements traditional Interest and Will Theories. Thi…
Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights
What makes something a human right? What is the relationship between the moral foundations of human rights and human rights law? What are the difficulties of appealing to human rights? This book offers a survey of current thinking on the philosophical foundations of human rights. Divided into four parts, this book focuses first on the moral grounds of human rights, for example in our dignity, agency, interests or needs. Secondly, it looks at the …
The Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights
The introduction introduces the history of the concept of human rights and its philosophical genealogy. It raises questions of the nature of human rights, the grounds of human rights, difference between proposed and actual human rights, and scepticism surrounding the very idea of human rights. In the course of this discussion, it concludes that the diversity of positions on human rights is a sign of the intellectual, cultural, and political ferti…
Human Rights Law Without Natural Moral Rights
In this latest work by one of our leading political and legal philosophers, Allen Buchanan outlines a novel framework for assessing the system of international human rights law—the system that he takes to be the heart of modern human rights practice. Buchanan does not offer a full justification for the current system, but rather aims “to make a strong prima facie case that the existing system as a whole has what it takes to warrant our support of…
XI-Why is it Disrespectful to Violate Rights?
Violating a person's rights is disrespectful to that person. This is because it is disrespectful to someone to violate duties owed to that person. I call these ‘directed duties’; they are the flipside of rights. The aim of this paper is to consider why directed duties and respect are linked, and to highlight a puzzle about this linkage, a puzzle arising from the fact that many directed duties are justified independently of whether they do anythin…
Crime, Punishment, and Responsibility
For many years, Antony Duff has been one of the world's foremost philosophers of criminal law. This volume(s chapters, taken from essays by many of the world's other leading philosophers of criminal law as well as a reply by Duff himself, explore some of the principal themes in his work. Some of the chapters concentrate on the topic of criminalisation. That is, they examine what forms of conduct (including attempts, offensiveness, and negligence)…
Human rights as rights
This essay makes three suggestions: first, that it is attractive to conceive individualistic justification as one of the hallmarks -maybe even the one hallmark -of human rights; secondly, that combining this conception of human rights with standard worries about socioeconomic rights can tempt one to take the phrase "human rights" to refer to any individualistically justified weighty normative consideration (including considerations that are not r…
Crime, punishment, and responsibility
For many years, Antony Duff has been one of the world's foremost philosophers of criminal law. This volume collects essays by leading criminal law theorists to explore the principal themes in his work. In a response to the essays, Duff clarifies and develops his position on central problems in criminal law theory
Kamm and Miller on Rights’ Compatibility
On the Non-instrumental Value of Basic Rights
Basic rights are often of great instrumental value in securing protection for important human needs and interests. The first two sections of this paper defend the thesis that basic rights are also valuable independently of their instrumental role. Taking my cue from Frances Kamm's suggestion that basic rights reflect or express human worth, in the third, fourth and fifth sections I develop the proposal that the non-instrumental value of basic rig…
Are Property Rights Ever Basic Human Rights
Stealing from someone is not as bad as torturing, killing or raping them. But is the difference between theft and these fundamental violations simply a difference in degree (of severity)? I begin this article by outlining several ways in which the moral grounds for property rights differ in kind from those for basic human rights, differences that underpin and explain the difference in severity. I go on to ask whether, despite these differences, t…
Two Approaches to Human Rights
Building on his very impressive set of articles published over the last ten years, James Griffin's On Human Rights (henceforward G) argues that human rights are protections of personhood, and he develops an account of personhood as centrally comprising agency: Human life is different from the life of other animals. We human beings have a conception of ourselves and of our past and future. We reflect and assess. We form pictures of what a good lif…
Against Individualistic Justifications of Property Rights
In this article I argue that, despite the views of such theorists as Locke, Hart and Raz, most of a person's property rights cannot be individualistically justified. Instead most property rights, if justified at all, must be justified on non-individualistic (e.g. consequentialist) grounds. This, I suggest, implies that most property rights cannot be morally fundamental ‘human rights’
Why Aren't Duties Rights
The best analyses of the concept ‘rights’ maintain that Hohfeldian claims, privileges, powers, immunities, liabilities, and clusters of these positions, all qualify as rights when they satisfy some further condition, such as serving their holder's interests, or fulfilling some alternative function. But duties, disabilities and no‐rights can also satisfy this further condition. For example, many duties, disabilities and no‐rights serve their holde…
Human Rights, Individualism and Cultural Diversity
Two features of human‐rights discourse are often targeted for criticism: its universalism and its individualism. Both features, it is usually claimed, illegitimately overlook the significance of cultural diversity. In this essay I argue that individualism is incompatible with universalism and compatible with cultural diversity. Thus I defend the view that human rights are individualistically justified, and I argue that it follows from this that h…
Human Rights and Positive Duties
In World Poverty and Human Rights , Thomas Pogge presents a range of attractive policy proposals—limiting the international resource and borrowing privileges, decentralizing sovereignty, and introducing a “global resources dividend”—aimed at remedying the poverty and suffering generated by the global economic order. These proposals could be motivated as a response to positive duties to assist the global poor, or they could be justified on consequ…
Human Rights and Positive Duties
In World Poverty and Human Rights , Thomas Pogge presents a range of attractive policy proposals—limiting the international resource and borrowing privileges, decentralizing sovereignty, and introducing a “global resources dividend”—aimed at remedying the poverty and suffering generated by the global economic order. These proposals could be motivated as a response to positive duties to assist the global poor, or they could be justified on consequ…
Against Individualistic Justifications of Property Rights
In this article I argue that, despite the views of such theorists as Locke, Hart and Raz, most of a person's property rights cannot be individualistically justified. Instead most property rights, if justified at all, must be justified on non-individualistic (e.g. consequentialist) grounds. This, I suggest, implies that most property rights cannot be morally fundamental ‘human rights’
Are Property Rights Ever Basic Human Rights
Stealing from someone is not as bad as torturing, killing or raping them. But is the difference between theft and these fundamental violations simply a difference in degree (of severity)? I begin this article by outlining several ways in which the moral grounds for property rights differ in kind from those for basic human rights, differences that underpin and explain the difference in severity. I go on to ask whether, despite these differences, t…
Human Rights, Individualism and Cultural Diversity
Two features of human‐rights discourse are often targeted for criticism: its universalism and its individualism. Both features, it is usually claimed, illegitimately overlook the significance of cultural diversity. In this essay I argue that individualism is incompatible with universalism and compatible with cultural diversity. Thus I defend the view that human rights are individualistically justified, and I argue that it follows from this that h…
Human Rights, Individualism and Cultural Diversity
Two features of human‐rights discourse are often targeted for criticism: its universalism and its individualism. Both features, it is usually claimed, illegitimately overlook the significance of cultural diversity. In this essay I argue that individualism is incompatible with universalism and compatible with cultural diversity. Thus I defend the view that human rights are individualistically justified, and I argue that it follows from this that h…
Human Rights and Positive Duties
In World Poverty and Human Rights , Thomas Pogge presents a range of attractive policy proposals—limiting the international resource and borrowing privileges, decentralizing sovereignty, and introducing a “global resources dividend”—aimed at remedying the poverty and suffering generated by the global economic order. These proposals could be motivated as a response to positive duties to assist the global poor, or they could be justified on consequ…
Against Individualistic Justifications of Property Rights
In this article I argue that, despite the views of such theorists as Locke, Hart and Raz, most of a person's property rights cannot be individualistically justified. Instead most property rights, if justified at all, must be justified on non-individualistic (e.g. consequentialist) grounds. This, I suggest, implies that most property rights cannot be morally fundamental ‘human rights’
Why Aren't Duties Rights
The best analyses of the concept ‘rights’ maintain that Hohfeldian claims, privileges, powers, immunities, liabilities, and clusters of these positions, all qualify as rights when they satisfy some further condition, such as serving their holder's interests, or fulfilling some alternative function. But duties, disabilities and no‐rights can also satisfy this further condition. For example, many duties, disabilities and no‐rights serve their holde…
Kamm and Miller on Rights’ Compatibility
On the Non-instrumental Value of Basic Rights
Basic rights are often of great instrumental value in securing protection for important human needs and interests. The first two sections of this paper defend the thesis that basic rights are also valuable independently of their instrumental role. Taking my cue from Frances Kamm's suggestion that basic rights reflect or express human worth, in the third, fourth and fifth sections I develop the proposal that the non-instrumental value of basic rig…
Are Property Rights Ever Basic Human Rights
Stealing from someone is not as bad as torturing, killing or raping them. But is the difference between theft and these fundamental violations simply a difference in degree (of severity)? I begin this article by outlining several ways in which the moral grounds for property rights differ in kind from those for basic human rights, differences that underpin and explain the difference in severity. I go on to ask whether, despite these differences, t…
Two Approaches to Human Rights
Building on his very impressive set of articles published over the last ten years, James Griffin's On Human Rights (henceforward G) argues that human rights are protections of personhood, and he develops an account of personhood as centrally comprising agency: Human life is different from the life of other animals. We human beings have a conception of ourselves and of our past and future. We reflect and assess. We form pictures of what a good lif…
Crime, Punishment, and Responsibility
For many years, Antony Duff has been one of the world's foremost philosophers of criminal law. This volume(s chapters, taken from essays by many of the world's other leading philosophers of criminal law as well as a reply by Duff himself, explore some of the principal themes in his work. Some of the chapters concentrate on the topic of criminalisation. That is, they examine what forms of conduct (including attempts, offensiveness, and negligence)…
Human rights as rights
This essay makes three suggestions: first, that it is attractive to conceive individualistic justification as one of the hallmarks -maybe even the one hallmark -of human rights; secondly, that combining this conception of human rights with standard worries about socioeconomic rights can tempt one to take the phrase "human rights" to refer to any individualistically justified weighty normative consideration (including considerations that are not r…
Crime, punishment, and responsibility
For many years, Antony Duff has been one of the world's foremost philosophers of criminal law. This volume collects essays by leading criminal law theorists to explore the principal themes in his work. In a response to the essays, Duff clarifies and develops his position on central problems in criminal law theory
XI-Why is it Disrespectful to Violate Rights?
Violating a person's rights is disrespectful to that person. This is because it is disrespectful to someone to violate duties owed to that person. I call these ‘directed duties’; they are the flipside of rights. The aim of this paper is to consider why directed duties and respect are linked, and to highlight a puzzle about this linkage, a puzzle arising from the fact that many directed duties are justified independently of whether they do anythin…
Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights
What makes something a human right? What is the relationship between the moral foundations of human rights and human rights law? What are the difficulties of appealing to human rights? This book offers a survey of current thinking on the philosophical foundations of human rights. Divided into four parts, this book focuses first on the moral grounds of human rights, for example in our dignity, agency, interests or needs. Secondly, it looks at the …
The Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights
The introduction introduces the history of the concept of human rights and its philosophical genealogy. It raises questions of the nature of human rights, the grounds of human rights, difference between proposed and actual human rights, and scepticism surrounding the very idea of human rights. In the course of this discussion, it concludes that the diversity of positions on human rights is a sign of the intellectual, cultural, and political ferti…
Human Rights Law Without Natural Moral Rights
In this latest work by one of our leading political and legal philosophers, Allen Buchanan outlines a novel framework for assessing the system of international human rights law—the system that he takes to be the heart of modern human rights practice. Buchanan does not offer a full justification for the current system, but rather aims “to make a strong prima facie case that the existing system as a whole has what it takes to warrant our support of…
Human Rights, Ownership, and the Individual
What do we mean by rights, and can our use of the concept be justified? This book offers a partial vindication of the concept of a right, defending its use in relation to human rights while questioning it in relation to property. It starts with a new ‘Addressive’ account of the nature of rights as bringing together duty-bearer and right-holder first-personally—a theory which moves beyond and complements traditional Interest and Will Theories. Thi…
Rethinking the Post‐Truth Polarisation Narrative
This article critically evaluates what we call the ‘popular narrative’ about the state of the public sphere. We identify three elements of this popular narrative (the post‐truth element, the polarisation element and the new technology element), and draw on philosophical work on hinge epistemology and social roles to challenge each one. We propose, instead, that public debate has always depended on non‐evidential commitments, that it has always be…
On Rights, Human Rights, and Property
This article responds to papers by Joseph Bowen, Simon May, Zofia Stemplowska, and Nick Sage, focused on my monograph, Human Rights, Ownership, and the Individual (OUP, 2019). The book develops a new account of the nature of rights: as duties governed by ‘addressive’ norms of first‐ and second‐personal thinking. This account has implications for both human rights and property rights. It implies that human rights in law should be founded on pre‐le…
Moral powers and the moral community
First paragraph: Morality is clearly in some sense a human creation. The difficulty is: in what sense? Richardson's Articulating the Moral Community offers a partial answer to this question. He argues that the moral community can exercise a power to create moral changes: refinements of current moral principles can be generated through this power. Richardson uses the term ‘articulation’ in the engineer's sense, referring to a body that ‘has parts …
Law (17 works) · Political science (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Law and economics (15 works) · Human rights (14 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (14 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Law (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works)