Rights-Based Ethics: Foundations and Applications (Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory)

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.

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.