ABSTRACT
In his editor’s introduction to Seyla Benhabib’s essay ‘Another Cosmopolitanism’ and the commentaries on it (Benhabib 2006), Robert Post highlights the dilemma of reconciling the particularism of law with the universalism of ethics. Law in democratic societies, he explains, depends for its authority and effectiveness on being the outcome of the will of a particular people, and it obtains within a particular territory. This territory may be a single state, or a regional grouping of states such as the European Union (EU), but it has a defined boundary within which it is in force. Ethics, on the other hand, does not draw its authority from the consent of a particular population; rather, it stakes its claims in the name of all humankind, drawing its authority from universal concepts, such as the moral equality of all people. Post sees the development of the human rights conventions and agreements which have proliferated since the Nuremberg Trials as a way of reconciling the authority and enforceability of positive law and the claims entailed in humanity rather than citizenship. ‘Human rights’, he says, ‘aspire to embody universal ethical obligations within the form of law’ (Post 2006, 2).
