Debate: Human Rights and the Politics of Victimhood
Human Rights and the Politics of Victimhood [Excerpt]
11/25/02
Meister argues for a renewal of the politics of victim and beneficiary that avoids moral pitfalls of the revolutionary project. These pitfalls inhere in a politics of victimhood.
Author(s):
Robert Meister
Human Wrongs and the Tragedy of Victimhood: Response to "Human Rights and the Politics of Victimhood" [Excerpt]
11/25/02
The problem with the politics of victimhood, as conducted by revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries engaged in ideological conflict, is that it creates a morally arbitrary hierarchy of victims that can then be used to justify the worst moral transgressions against the "other."
Author(s):
Catherine Lu
Liberals, Revolutionaries, and Responsibility: Final Rejoinder [Excerpt]
11/25/02
In the aftermath of violence and oppression, social justice and moral regeneration must begin with institutions of moral accounting, such as trials and truth commissions, that, however imperfectly, revitalize notions of individual, social, and political responsibility.
Author(s):
Catherine Lu
The Liberalism of Fear and the Counterrevolutionary Project: Reply to Catherine Lu [Excerpt]
11/25/02
"While Lu invokes Shklar's 'liberalism of fear' as a 'transcendence' of the politics of friend and foe, I regard it as an attempt to give liberalism political purchase by identifying its true foe, those whose political convictions make them insensitive to cruelty, and especially to physical cruelty."
Author(s):
Robert Meister
eNewsletter Signup
Most Emailed Pages