Rights-Based Ethics: Foundations and Applications

by Marcus Düwell (Editor), Johannes Graf Keyserlingk (Editor), Philipp Richter (Editor)

Overview

Rights-based ethics offer a conceptual framework to address the complex ethical issues of our time. This volume combines systematic and historical perspectives on rights-based ethics with discussions of a broad range of topics in applied ethics to assess the achievements and limits of rights-based approaches.

The normative concepts of fundamental human rights and human dignity play an essential role in considerations about global justice and international politics. However, these concepts have not been taken up sufficiently in the standard approaches to normative ethics. This volume contends that rights-based approaches in ethics not only offer a theoretical framework to explain complex normative concepts, but they can also offer answers to some of today’s most complex moral questions. First, the book addresses the conceptual and foundational questions of rights-based ethics. Second, it offers historical and cultural perspectives on rights. Third, it explores how rights-based ethics can address applied issues related to climate change, health systems, global supply chains, and the finance industry.

This volume will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working in ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of law, and the social sciences.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 4.0 International license. This publication was made possible by generous support of the Open Access-monograph funds of the university library of the TU Darmstadt and by generous support of the Institute for Philosophy I at the Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Research of the Ruhr-University Bochum.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781040431726
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/16/2025
Series:	Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	366
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Marcus Düwell is a Professor of Philosophy at Technical University Darmstadt, Germany. His research interests include foundational questions of moral and political philosophy, philosophical anthropology, bioethics, and climate ethics. His publications include the Cambridge Handbook on Human Dignity (2013) and Towards the Ethics of a Green Future (Routledge, 2018).

Johannes Graf Keyserlingk is a philosopher and social scientist who gained a PhD at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, in 2017. His research interests are political philosophy, digital ethics, and economic ethics.

Philipp Richter is a Professor of Philosophy at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Since 2019, he has held the Chair of Teaching Philosophy and Ethics at the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences. Richter has published books and papers on methods of teaching philosophy and on normative and applied ethics.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Introduction Introduction: Rights-Based Ethics – Outline of an Approach Part 2: Conceptual and Foundational Questions 1. Why a Rights-Based Ethics? 2. Human Dignity as Absolute Inner Value and Moral Status 3. Reason and Moralities: The Prudential Foundations of Ethics in Alan Gewirth‘s Procedural Rationalism 4. Proving a Categorical Imperative by the Possibility of Self-Contradiction: The Paradox of Method in a Critique of Practical Reason 5. Conceptual Tools for the Analysis of Rights 6. The Problem of Aggregation in a Rights-based Moral Theory 7. What Do I Morally Owe to Myself? On the Moral Right to Freedom and Duties to Oneself in Alan Gewirth’s Right-based Ethics Part 3: Historical and Cultural Perspectives on Rights 8. Rights, Coercion and the Will of the People. On the Relationship between Politics and Normativity in Marsilius of Padua 9. Do Immoralists Suffer a Loss of Meaning in Life? A Focus on Gewirth’s Theory of Self-Fulfillment and Metz’s Fundamentality Theory Part 4: Rights in Contexts of Applied Ethics 10. On a Freedom-Based Concept of Person and Its Bioethical Consequences 11. Moral Rights as Criteria for Professional Nursing Care 12. How Should One Respond to Climate Change? A Rights-Based Ethical Theory’s Approach to the Problem 13. Standard Threats and (Mandatory) Human Rights Due Diligence in Global Supply Chains: On the Corporate Responsibility to Address Human Rights Abuses Committed by Third Parties 14. Rights-Based Ethics: A Family Dispute 15. Balancing Rights While Protecting the Climate 16. Too Big to Fail Banks, Private Credit Creation, and Systemic Risks: Challenges of a Modern Ethics of Risk Part 5: Outlook 17. On the Foundations and Implications of Moral Rights