ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the obstacles to a relational reinvention of human rights within the terms of the liberal project. It gives a succinct genealogy of human rights philosophy since the Middle Ages, revealing how these rights have been ‘de-relationised’ and ‘individualised’. It then turns to existing criticisms of liberal rights theory. First, the communitarian critique of rights is elucidated. By emphasising variants of a ‘right’ or ‘obligation to belong’ to a political community, the communitarian tradition necessitates the granting of superior rights to the community itself in order to uphold individual human rights. But the constitution of this rights-giving community remains underspecified. Secondly, feminist relational theorists also find problems in the atomistic subject of liberal rights, finding that it struggles to delimit the choices actually available to individuals. They argue for greater attention to relations of vulnerability, care and dependence in the conception of rights. But like liberal rights, relational theory’s rights also depend on certain rights ‘trumping’ others, albeit in a far more nuanced manner, without explaining who can exercise such ‘trump’ rights. In fact, a relational approach must find a way of synthesising liberal and communitarian starting points by thinking about selfhood and community, relationally-constituted personhood and the ends (telos) of rights. It is here that Ricoeur’s thought, specifically his hermeneutics of suspicion, can make a contribution. [PH]
