Benjamin Gregg
Biographic Data
| ID | 251700 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Benjamin Gregg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Benjamin |
| FAMILY NAME | Gregg |
| SIGNATURE | GREGG B |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9510-6147 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 47 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Atheism as a condition of procedural legitimacy in democratic community
Nonreligious persons —atheists, agnostics, and the unaffiliated— remain systematically marginalized within liberal democracies that profess commitment to pluralism. I show that such exclusion is not accidental but structurally embedded in pluralisms still defined by theological premises. Through a fact-sensitive, non-ideal methodology integrating political theory with social-scientific research, I document the legal asymmetries, social stigma, an…
Chapter 1 From Social Construct to Political Power: Indigeneity as an Emancipatory Tool
Constraining Unaccountable AI with the Militant Pragmatism of Everyday Institutions
I assess Ayşe Aslı Bozdağ’s account of AI as political infrastructure, situating it at the intersection of Bratton’s Stack theory and Dussel’s ethics of exteriority. Bratton supplies a systems-level diagnosis of how AI governs through layered forms of power, while Dussel provides a normative standpoint to judge this governance, as the lived experience of persons excluded or harmed by dominant systems. Bozdağ’s originality lies in translating this…
Indigeneity As Social Construct and Political Tool: Critique and Reconstruction of a Contested Identity
The Structure of Ideas: Mapping A New Theory of Free Expression in the AI Era by Jared Schroeder
Vitoria’s cosmopolitan potential realized: Human nature and human rights via social construction, not natural law
Vitoria’s 1537 lecture On the American Indians asserts moral equality and fundamental rights for all humans but is contradicted by the significant inequalities between Spanish conquistadores and indigenous peoples of Mexico and Peru. Despite recognizing these rights, Vitoria’s vision supports an unequal Euro-American relationship regarding territorial sovereignty, self-defense, self-determination, and religious freedom. His insights have implicat…
Might the bioethical principle of individual decisional autonomy have a politically liberalizing effect on soft authoritarian communities
According to the bioethical principle of individual decisional autonomy, the patient has a right of informed consent to any medical or experimental procedure. The principle is politically liberal by advocating significant individual freedom as guaranteed by law and secured by civil liberties. When practiced in illiberal communities, might it have a political liberalizing effect? I respond first by analyzing cross-national norms of individual deci…
Creating Human Nature: The Political Challenges of Genetic Engineering
Governing through Expertise: The Politics of Bioethics
Can politics ever be ethical? Can ethics ever be nonpolitical? Perhaps if ethical entrepreneurs can bring their principled analysis and conclusions to bear in public policy, politics can be ethical. Alternatively, if politics—in pursuit of power, influence, and effect—inevitably colonizes ethical thinking, distorting its normative potential by subverting its moral integrity, then ethics can never be nonpolitical. Annabelle Littoz-Monnet wants to …
Creating Human Nature: The Political Challenges of Genetic Engineering
Regulating genetic engineering guided by human dignity, not genetic essentialism
How might a liberal democratic community best regulate human genetic engineering? Relevant debates widely deploy the usually undefined term "human dignity." Its indeterminacy in meaning and use renders it useless as a guiding principle. In this article, I reject the human genome as somehow invested with a moral status, a position I call "genetic essentialism." I explain why a critique of genetic essentialism is not a strawman and argue against de…
Moyn, Samuel. Not Enough. Human Rights in an Unequal World . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2018. 296 pp
Beyond Due Diligence: The Human Rights Corporation
Against Self-Isolation as a Human Right of Indigenous Peoples in Latin America
How to read for current developments in human genetics relevant to justice
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The promise of human rights: Constitutional government, democratic legitimacy, and international law
The human rights state: Theoretical challenges, empirical deployments: reply to my critics
I respond to a broad range of challenges that the seven articles of this special issue raise for the theory of a human rights state. The first two articles address the theory as a whole. The first reconfigures the human rights state as an analytical tool for measuring implementation. I counter that such measurement is not possible without normative interpretation. The second article insists that any human rights project can only be valid if valid…
Human Rights as Metaphor for Political Community beyond the Nation State
One generally enjoys rights, if at all, then only as a member of a particular political community. The nation state's territorial sovereignty precludes the possibility of human rights. I propose a 'human rights state' whose members seek the corresponding nation state's embrace of human rights. It functions as a metaphor with 'deontic power', with each member carrying these deontic powers in a 'human rights backpack'. Metaphorical thinking is more…
Advancing Human Rights in Post-Authoritarian Communities through Education
For two decades now, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Russia, have been transitioning from authoritarian pasts to somewhat more liberal forms of social and political organization. The development of human rights consciousness confronts three core challenges posed by the legacy of twentieth century communism: associational life reduced to niche or clique; lack of trust; and discouragement of individual personhood. Practition…
Human Rights as Social Construction
Comparative Perspectives on Social Integration in Pluralistic Societies: Thick Norms versus Thin
I address major challenges to dealing with contentious public issues by replacing thick norms with thin ones: (1) Secularism, individual liberty, equal rights, and rule of law lend themselves to politics more thin than thick; does this condemn the approach to its own kind of thickness? (2) If the unit of analysis is the individual, and if the individual’s primary project is his or her liberty, must this approach threaten the communitarian self-un…
Human Rights as Social Construction
Most conceptions of human rights rely on metaphysical or theological assumptions that construe them as possible only as something imposed from outside existing communities. Most people, in other words, presume that human rights come from nature, God, or the United Nations. This book argues that reliance on such putative sources actually undermines human rights. Benjamin Gregg envisions an alternative; he sees human rights as locally developed, fr…
Deploying Cognitive Sociology to Advance Human Rights
No one, neither speculative philosopher nor empirical anthropologist, has ever shown human rights to be anything other than a culturally particular social construction. If human rights are not natural, divine, or metaphysical, then they can only be a social construction of particular cultures. If so, then many cultures may justifiably reject them as culturally foreign and hence without local normative validity. In response to this conclusion I de…
Individuals as authors of human rights: Not Only Addressees
Translating Human Rights into Muslim Vernaculars
Using Islam as an example, I show how interpreters can develop human rights within their own culture even as they draw on extra-local ideas and practices. They can do so despite points of significant conflict between the local culture and that of human rights, in ways that need to resonate with the local culture yet also challenge it. Translators can do the work they do because they have the 'dual consciousness' of outside intermediaries and loca…
Human Rights as Social Construction
Translating Human Rights into Muslim Vernaculars
Using Islam as an example, I show how interpreters can develop human rights within their own culture even as they draw on extra-local ideas and practices. They can do so despite points of significant conflict between the local culture and that of human rights, in ways that need to resonate with the local culture yet also challenge it. Translators can do the work they do because they have the 'dual consciousness' of outside intermediaries and loca…
Deploying Cognitive Sociology to Advance Human Rights
No one, neither speculative philosopher nor empirical anthropologist, has ever shown human rights to be anything other than a culturally particular social construction. If human rights are not natural, divine, or metaphysical, then they can only be a social construction of particular cultures. If so, then many cultures may justifiably reject them as culturally foreign and hence without local normative validity. In response to this conclusion I de…
Regulating genetic engineering guided by human dignity, not genetic essentialism
How might a liberal democratic community best regulate human genetic engineering? Relevant debates widely deploy the usually undefined term "human dignity." Its indeterminacy in meaning and use renders it useless as a guiding principle. In this article, I reject the human genome as somehow invested with a moral status, a position I call "genetic essentialism." I explain why a critique of genetic essentialism is not a strawman and argue against de…
Possibility of social critique in an indeterminate world
Human Rights as Metaphor for Political Community beyond the Nation State
One generally enjoys rights, if at all, then only as a member of a particular political community. The nation state's territorial sovereignty precludes the possibility of human rights. I propose a 'human rights state' whose members seek the corresponding nation state's embrace of human rights. It functions as a metaphor with 'deontic power', with each member carrying these deontic powers in a 'human rights backpack'. Metaphorical thinking is more…
Using Legal Rules in an Indeterminate World: Overcoming the Limitations of Jurisprudence
Face a l'indetermination du sens et de l'application des lois dans le domaine des procedures juridiques, l'A. souligne le danger d'une manipulation de ces lois par les juges sous couvert de leur pretendue protection. Tirant les consequences politiques, sociales et normatives de la dependance contextuelle des lois en jurisprudence, l'A. etudie l'utilisation des lois dans le comportement des individus dans un monde indetermine. S'inspirant de Husse…
Might the bioethical principle of individual decisional autonomy have a politically liberalizing effect on soft authoritarian communities
According to the bioethical principle of individual decisional autonomy, the patient has a right of informed consent to any medical or experimental procedure. The principle is politically liberal by advocating significant individual freedom as guaranteed by law and secured by civil liberties. When practiced in illiberal communities, might it have a political liberalizing effect? I respond first by analyzing cross-national norms of individual deci…
Governing through Expertise: The Politics of Bioethics
Can politics ever be ethical? Can ethics ever be nonpolitical? Perhaps if ethical entrepreneurs can bring their principled analysis and conclusions to bear in public policy, politics can be ethical. Alternatively, if politics—in pursuit of power, influence, and effect—inevitably colonizes ethical thinking, distorting its normative potential by subverting its moral integrity, then ethics can never be nonpolitical. Annabelle Littoz-Monnet wants to …
Beyond Due Diligence: The Human Rights Corporation
The promise of human rights: Constitutional government, democratic legitimacy, and international law
The human rights state: Theoretical challenges, empirical deployments: reply to my critics
I respond to a broad range of challenges that the seven articles of this special issue raise for the theory of a human rights state. The first two articles address the theory as a whole. The first reconfigures the human rights state as an analytical tool for measuring implementation. I counter that such measurement is not possible without normative interpretation. The second article insists that any human rights project can only be valid if valid…
Advancing Human Rights in Post-Authoritarian Communities through Education
For two decades now, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Russia, have been transitioning from authoritarian pasts to somewhat more liberal forms of social and political organization. The development of human rights consciousness confronts three core challenges posed by the legacy of twentieth century communism: associational life reduced to niche or clique; lack of trust; and discouragement of individual personhood. Practition…
Comparative Perspectives on Social Integration in Pluralistic Societies: Thick Norms versus Thin
I address major challenges to dealing with contentious public issues by replacing thick norms with thin ones: (1) Secularism, individual liberty, equal rights, and rule of law lend themselves to politics more thin than thick; does this condemn the approach to its own kind of thickness? (2) If the unit of analysis is the individual, and if the individual’s primary project is his or her liberty, must this approach threaten the communitarian self-un…
Individuals as authors of human rights: Not Only Addressees
Adjudicating among competing systems of belief
(1999). Adjudicating among competing systems of belief. International Review of Sociology: Vol. 9, The Future for Professions: Current Analytical Challenges, pp. 7-17
Books in Review
The Modernization of Contemporary Chinese Law
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China remains the world's only major communist society. Will China's regime go the way of its Soviet counterpart, or might it survive well into the next century and beyond? I do not undertake to answer this question directly. But my analysis of one sector of contemporary Chinese society—the legal system—suggests that the Communist party is losing its tight control over several major …
The Search for "Normality" in the Relationship between Germans and Jews
Sigrid Meuschel, Benjamin Gregg, The Search for "Normality" in the Relationship between Germans and Jews, New German Critique, No. 38, Special Issue on the German-Jewish Controversy (Spring - Summer, 1986), pp. 39-56
Theory and Politics
Helmut Dubiel Theory and Politics, translated by Benjamin Gregg (MIT Press: Boston, 1984)
The Search for "Normality" in the Relationship between Germans and Jews
Sigrid Meuschel, Benjamin Gregg, The Search for "Normality" in the Relationship between Germans and Jews, New German Critique, No. 38, Special Issue on the German-Jewish Controversy (Spring - Summer, 1986), pp. 39-56
Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory
This important study of the relationship between historical developments and the work of the scholars associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research yields fascinating insights into the actual workings of the Institute and the relationships among its members. The book has already had a major impact in Germany, where it has opened up the subject for argument and analysis by a new generation of scholars.Theory and Politics first explor…
In defense of a sceptical rationalism: A reply to Seyla Benhabib
Modernity in Frankfurt: Must a history of philosophy be a philosophy of history
Kritik der Macht
The Modernization of Contemporary Chinese Law
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China remains the world's only major communist society. Will China's regime go the way of its Soviet counterpart, or might it survive well into the next century and beyond? I do not undertake to answer this question directly. But my analysis of one sector of contemporary Chinese society—the legal system—suggests that the Communist party is losing its tight control over several major …
Possibility of social critique in an indeterminate world
Books in Review
Using Legal Rules in an Indeterminate World: Overcoming the Limitations of Jurisprudence
Face a l'indetermination du sens et de l'application des lois dans le domaine des procedures juridiques, l'A. souligne le danger d'une manipulation de ces lois par les juges sous couvert de leur pretendue protection. Tirant les consequences politiques, sociales et normatives de la dependance contextuelle des lois en jurisprudence, l'A. etudie l'utilisation des lois dans le comportement des individus dans un monde indetermine. S'inspirant de Husse…
Adjudicating among competing systems of belief
(1999). Adjudicating among competing systems of belief. International Review of Sociology: Vol. 9, The Future for Professions: Current Analytical Challenges, pp. 7-17
The Law and Courts of Enlightened Localism
What role should law play in the self-determination of communities? Notions of community typically invoke norms that claim validity for an entire group. Yet in complex modern societies almost any conception of generally valid norms is controversial because these societies are heterogeneous in many ways. Theories depicting law as a closed, recursive system of rules related to citizens hierarchically or vertically cannot capture this normative hete…
Proceduralism reconceived: Political conflict resolution under conditions of moral pluralism
Thick Moralities, Thin Politics: Social Integration Across Communities of Belief
At the center of pluralistic societies like the United States is the question of how to make broadly consensual social policy in light of the different moral values held by a heterogeneous population varying in ethnicity, sexual identity, religion, and political belief. In Thick Moralities, Thin Politics Benjamin Gregg develops a new approach to dealing with conflicting values in the policymaking process. Arguing that public policy suffers when p…
Translating Human Rights into Muslim Vernaculars
Using Islam as an example, I show how interpreters can develop human rights within their own culture even as they draw on extra-local ideas and practices. They can do so despite points of significant conflict between the local culture and that of human rights, in ways that need to resonate with the local culture yet also challenge it. Translators can do the work they do because they have the 'dual consciousness' of outside intermediaries and loca…
Deploying Cognitive Sociology to Advance Human Rights
No one, neither speculative philosopher nor empirical anthropologist, has ever shown human rights to be anything other than a culturally particular social construction. If human rights are not natural, divine, or metaphysical, then they can only be a social construction of particular cultures. If so, then many cultures may justifiably reject them as culturally foreign and hence without local normative validity. In response to this conclusion I de…
Individuals as authors of human rights: Not Only Addressees
Human Rights as Social Construction
Most conceptions of human rights rely on metaphysical or theological assumptions that construe them as possible only as something imposed from outside existing communities. Most people, in other words, presume that human rights come from nature, God, or the United Nations. This book argues that reliance on such putative sources actually undermines human rights. Benjamin Gregg envisions an alternative; he sees human rights as locally developed, fr…
Comparative Perspectives on Social Integration in Pluralistic Societies: Thick Norms versus Thin
I address major challenges to dealing with contentious public issues by replacing thick norms with thin ones: (1) Secularism, individual liberty, equal rights, and rule of law lend themselves to politics more thin than thick; does this condemn the approach to its own kind of thickness? (2) If the unit of analysis is the individual, and if the individual’s primary project is his or her liberty, must this approach threaten the communitarian self-un…
Human Rights as Social Construction
Advancing Human Rights in Post-Authoritarian Communities through Education
For two decades now, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Russia, have been transitioning from authoritarian pasts to somewhat more liberal forms of social and political organization. The development of human rights consciousness confronts three core challenges posed by the legacy of twentieth century communism: associational life reduced to niche or clique; lack of trust; and discouragement of individual personhood. Practition…
Human Rights as Metaphor for Political Community beyond the Nation State
One generally enjoys rights, if at all, then only as a member of a particular political community. The nation state's territorial sovereignty precludes the possibility of human rights. I propose a 'human rights state' whose members seek the corresponding nation state's embrace of human rights. It functions as a metaphor with 'deontic power', with each member carrying these deontic powers in a 'human rights backpack'. Metaphorical thinking is more…
The promise of human rights: Constitutional government, democratic legitimacy, and international law
The human rights state: Theoretical challenges, empirical deployments: reply to my critics
I respond to a broad range of challenges that the seven articles of this special issue raise for the theory of a human rights state. The first two articles address the theory as a whole. The first reconfigures the human rights state as an analytical tool for measuring implementation. I counter that such measurement is not possible without normative interpretation. The second article insists that any human rights project can only be valid if valid…
How to read for current developments in human genetics relevant to justice
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Political science (31 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Law (23 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Politics (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Human rights (13 works) · Law and economics (12 works) · Environmental ethics (10 works)