Institutionalising values: beyond human rights?

政治、法律的和社会机构可以服务的一个中心目标是实现-保护、促进和培养-基本的人类价值。但是，我们如何才能建立和维持能够很好地服务于这一目的的机构呢？它们的建设和运作应遵循什么原则？这个网络将汇集一个由哲学家、政治和法律的理论家、决策者和法律的实践者组成的国际小组，以解决这些问题，只有通过理论家和实践者都参与的彻底的跨学科办法才能充分解决这些问题。在澳大利亚人权委员会寻求资金期间，该网络将侧重于人权。在我们当代以权利为主导的环境中，价值观的制度化通常被理解为涉及人民人权的落实。最近，以权利为基础的机构重组提案如雨后春笋般涌现，从Pogge提议的国际资源和借贷特权改革（2002年）到法布尔关于身体部位销售的提案（2006年）。学者们的建议得到了政策制定者对与权利有关的机构的重组的配合--例如，《欧洲人权公约》在联合王国法律中的地位（1998年），以及公民伙伴关系的建立（2004年），苏格兰议会（1999年）和中国香港自治（1997年）14.虽然学术界和决策者对每一项改革都进行了单独的审查，但很少有关键性的重点放在指导旨在使基本价值观制度化的任何改革的一般原则上。特别是，人权讨论在这些改革中的核心作用迫切需要国际上的跨学科关注。诉诸人权的语言受到质疑。例如，将爱的成长作为一项人权，可以说忽视了家庭等法外制度，并错误地将制度与它们所保护的价值观之间的关系视为纯粹的工具。批评者还经常指责人权倡导者及其“西方帝国主义”的制度化。现在迫切需要的是对人权在基本价值的制度化中可以适当发挥的作用进行建设性的批判性审查：但目前关于人权的辩论通常过于有限和片面，无法提供这一点。人权的批评者和捍卫者跨越各种传统，彼此之间很少互动，因此，他们似乎常常谈论过去，而不是彼此，而现有的国际人权网络主要涉及法律的和非政府组织的活动家，他们完全支持这种讨论。相比之下，我们提议的网络将从跨文化的知情规范角度对人权进行严格审查，汇集来自法律和哲学以及不同知识传统的批评家，沿着来自学术界和实践者的跨学科人权捍卫者。扩大我们的关注范围，以包括我们最初的人权网络讨论中产生的问题，这些问题涉及价值制度化的一般问题，例如设计能够适当尊重（非？）人权和其他价值观的普遍性;人权方法无法容纳的美学和环境规范的制度化;个人对价值实现机构的责任;法律的和次级法律机构在实现不同价值观方面的适当作用。斯特林大学将成为该网络由澳大利亚人权委员会资助的阶段的基地。将通过非政府组织Jubilee Scotland调解公众参与该网络。

One central purpose that political, legal and social institutions can serve is the realisation - the protection, the promotion, the fostering - of fundamental human values. But how can we create and maintain institutions that will serve this purpose well? What principles should guide their construction and operations? This network will bring together an international team of philosophers, political and legal theorists, policy-makers and legal practitioners to address these questions, which can be adequately tackled only through a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach involving both theorists and practitioners. During the period for which AHRC funding is sought, the network will focus on human rights. In our contemporary rights-dominated climate, the institutionalisation of values is commonly understood as concerning enforcement of people's human rights. There has been a recent flowering of rights-based proposals for re-structuring institutions, from Pogge's proposed reforms to the international resource and borrowing privileges (2002) to Fabre's proposals on the sale of body parts (2006). Academics' proposals have been matched by policy-makers' restructuring of rights-related institutions - e.g. the entrenchment of the European Convention on Human Rights in UK law (1998), and the creation of civil partnerships (2004), of the Scottish parliament (1999) and of devolved self-government for Hong Kong within China (1997).While each reform has been examined individually by academics and policy-makers, there has been little critical focus on the general principles that should guide any reform intended to institutionalise fundamental values. In particular, the central role of human rights discourse in these reforms urgently requires international cross-disciplinary attention. Recourse to the language of human rights is contested. For example, instituting a human right to a loving upbringing arguably ignores extra-legal institutions such as the family, and mistakenly takes the relation between institutions and the values they protect to be purely instrumental. Critics also frequently accuse advocates of human rights and their institutionalisation of 'Western imperialism'. What is urgently needed is a constructively critical examination of the role that human rights can properly play in the institutionalisation of fundamental values: but current debates about human rights are usually too limited and too partial to provide this. Critics and defenders of human rights span a diversity of traditions that rarely interact with each other, so that they too often seem to talk past rather than to each other, while the existing international human rights networks largely involve legal and NGO campaigners who fully support the discourse. By contrast, our proposed network will subject human rights to critical scrutiny from a trans-culturally informed normative perspective, by bringing together critics from law and philosophy, and from different intellectual traditions, along with cross-disciplinary defenders of human rights drawn internationally from both the academy and practitioners.Following the AHRC-funded stage of the network, we will develop further projects, broadening our focus to encompass questions - arising from our initial human rights network discussions - concerning general issues about the institutionalisation of value, such as the design of institutions that can appropriately respect the (non?)universality of human rights and other values; the institutionalisation of aesthetic and environmental norms that cannot be accommodated by the human rights approach; the individual's responsibility in relation to value-realising institutions; the appropriate role for legal and sub-legal institutions in realising different values.The University of Stirling will be the base for the AHRC-funded stage of the network. Public engagement with the network will be mediated through the NGO, Jubilee Scotland.