Human Rights and Ethical Reasoning: Capabilities, Conventions and Spheres of Public Action

Ethical Theory of Utilitarianism and Human Rights Development

Background: Utilitarianism is a school whose founders have justified it by emphasizing consequentialism as a public interest. The school of utilitarianism is a moral and naturalistic school that justifies principles such as justice and individual and collective freedoms. For utilitarian, one cannot rely solely on individual interests and neglect the collective interest or group interest. Human ...

Human Rights and Capabilities

The two concepts — human rights and capabilities — go well with each other, so long as we do not try to subsume either concept entirely within the territory of the other. There are many human rights that can be seen as rights to particular capabilities. However, human rights to important process freedoms cannot be adequately analysed within the capability framework. Furthermore, both human righ...

Reasoning about Types of Action and Action Capabilities

We present a logical system for reasoning about types of actions (processes) and about agent capabilities to execute types of actions. The syntax of the system is based on that of Propositional Dynamic Logic (PDL), though the semantics we define is different (interpreting process terms as types, i.e. sets of binary relations). The standard PDL syntax is extended with capabilities statements, as...

Circumcision: human rights and ethical medical practice.

• The scientific data are not sufficient to recommend neonatal circumcision of males. • The procedure is not essential to the child's well-being. • Parents should determine what is in the best interests of the child. • To make an informed choice, parents should be given accurate and unbiased information and be provided the opportunity to discuss this decision. • Existing scientific evidence dem...

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