Making rights ordinary: a reply to Michael Ignatieff.

• Date: 22 March 2017
• Author: Newman, Dwight

It is an honour to engage with the fascinating and wide-ranging lecture delivered by Michael Ignatieff on "Human Rights, Global Ethics, and the Ordinary Virtues." Professor Ignatieff has powerfully described his engagement in conversations on rights and virtues with individuals in a number of communities around the world. And he has spoken insightfully of how to think of the ethical concerns that animated the human rights movement in a way that can actually operate at the intersection of law and politics, of theory and real life. One cannot but react in admiration to his simultaneous idealism and thinking about how to make the ideal more real in human life.

However, at the same time, I am going to quibble with what seems to be to be an inadvertent blind spot in Professor Ignatieff's conception of rights and how that missing dimension could lead to mistaken assumptions or even mistaken approaches. Realizing as much starts out with noticing his focus on the human rights instruments adopted in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt's speeches, and so on. What is missing is any focus on later human rights instruments--and one instrument in particular that actually should shake up more of our conceptions than may even first be apparent.

In describing his conversations in different communities about...