Human rights capture what people need to live minimally decent lives. Recognised dimensions of this minimum include physical security, due process, political participation, and freedom of movement, speech, and belief, as well as – more controversially for some – subsistence, shelter, health, education, culture, and community. Far less attention has been paid to the interpersonal, social dimensions of a minimally decent life, including our basic needs for decent human contact and acknowledgement, for interaction and adequate social inclusion, and for relationship, intimacy, and shared ways of living, as well as our competing interests in solitude and associative freedom.
Contributors:
Elizabeth Brake is a Professor of Philosophy at Rice University. She is the author of Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law (Oxford University Press, 2012), co-editor of Philosophical Foundations of Children’s and Family Law (Oxford University Press, 2018), and editor of After Marriage: Rethinking Marital Relationships (Oxford University Press, 2016). She is currently writing on the topic of wrongs and harms distinctive to intimate relationships.
Jenny Brown completed her PhD in Political Theory at University College London. She also holds an MSc in Political Theory from the London School of Economics and a BA in Politics and Philosophy from the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the parameters of a just regime of legally established marriage.
Kimberley Brownlee holds a Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Political and Social Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Her current work focuses on social rights, loneliness, belonging, and freedom of association. She is the author of Being Sure of Each Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience (Oxford University Press, 2012), and co-editor of the Blackwell Companion to Applied Philosophy (Wiley, 2016) and Disability and Disadvantage (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Stephanie Collins is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Monash University. Her current research focuses on social ontology. Her books include The Core of Care Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Group Duties: Their Existence and Their Implications for Individuals (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Chiara Cordelli is an Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Privatized State (Princeton University Press, 2020), which was awarded the 2021 ECPR Political Theory Prize, and the co-editor of Philanthropy in Democratic Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Alexandra Couto is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent. She holds an MPhil and DPhil in political theory from the University of Oxford. She previously taught at the University of Warwick and held research positions at the University of Vienna and University of Oslo. Her recent research has focused on the ethics of forgiveness, luck egalitarianism, and issues relating to innocently benefitting from injustices.
Rowan Cruft is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stirling. His research focuses on the nature and justification of rights and duties, and their role in shaping a democratic public sphere. He is the author of Human Rights, Ownership, and the Individual (Oxford University Press, 2019), co-editor of Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Crime Punishment, and Responsibility: The Jurisprudence of Antony Duff (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Bouke de Vries is a Research Fellow at the University of Zurich working on issues of loneliness and sociability, among other topics. His research is supported by an Ambizione grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Previously, he was a research fellow at Umea University where his research was supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council.
Anca Gheaus is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at the Central European University in Vienna. Most of her work concerns justice, especially justice in childrearing and gender justice. She is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children (Routledge, 2019) and is writing a monograph on child-centred childrearing.
Simon Hope is a Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at the University of Stirling. His current work focuses on two areas: the importance of Kant’s distinction between perfect/imperfect duties; and ways in which the history of colonization impacts upon what it could mean to do political philosophy. The latter interest arises from his participation in the UK/Ghana/Nigeria Domesticating Global Justice network, and his engagement with Maori political argument in the country of his birth, Aotearoa, New Zealand.
David Jenkins is a Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Otago, Aotearoa, New Zealand. Between 2017 and 2020, he was a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Warwick, and before that the Krzysztof Michalski Junior Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. He has published work on unconditional basic income, the politics of the public space in India, homelessness, James Baldwin and recognition, homelessness, structural injustice, and work.
S. Matthew Liao is the Director of the Center for Bioethics and Arthur Zitrin Professor of Bioethics at New York University. He is the author of The Right to be Loved (Oxford University Press, 2015), editor of The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (Oxford University Press, 2020) and of Moral Brains (Oxford University Press, 2016), and co-editor of Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2015), and of Current Controversies in Bioethics (Routledge 2016).
Adam Neal is a Leverhulme Trust-funded doctoral student in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. His research concerns the social and interpersonal implications of poverty and the ethical implications arising from the harms of loneliness and social isolation. He has co-authored forthcoming work on different conceptions of a neighbour.
James Nickel is Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at the University of Miami. His areas of work include human rights law and theory, political philosophy, philosophy of law, and constitutional law. Nickel is the author of Making Sense of Human Rights (Blackwell 1987, heavily revised 2nd ed. 2006) and of more than 70 articles in philosophy and law journals including the Columbia Law Review, Ethics, Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophy and Public Affairs, and Yale Journal of International Law.
Henry Shue is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for International Studies, University of Oxford. His books include Basic Rights (Princeton University Press, [1980] 2020), Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (Oxford University Press, 2014), Fighting Hurt: Rule and Exception in Torture and War (Oxford University Press, 2016), and The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now (Princeton University Press, 2021).
Jesse Tomalty is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bergen, Norway. Her research focuses on normative and conceptual questions about global justice and human rights. She has published articles on a range of themes including socio-economic human rights, duties to assist the global poor, the nature of human rights, and the ethics of immigration. She is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Human Rights