Fragile Freedoms

Fragile Freedom... highlight[s] how the protection and preservation of human rights are difficult but necessary challenges, requiring seemingly endless struggle and reflection.

Auteur
Steven Lecce teaches political theory in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba, where he is also Associate Dean of Arts. His research is primarily concerned with contemporary theories of social and distributive justice, and the ethical bases of the liberal-democratic state. He is the author of Against Perfectionism: Defending Liberal Neutrality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), and numerous articles about political philosophy. Recently, he was a Visiting Scholar at Oxford University's Centre for the Study of Social Justice. He is currently completing a sequel to Against Perfectionism entitled Equality's Domain.

Texte du rabat

This book is based upon a lecture series that took place between September 2013 and May 2014 to inaugurate the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights. It brings together some of the most influential contemporary thinkers on the theory and practice of human rights.

Résumé
This book is based upon a lecture series inaugurating the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights that took place in Winnipeg, Canada between September 2013 and May 2014. Fragile Freedoms brings together some of the most influential contemporary thinkers on the theory and practice of human rights. The first two chapters, by Anthony Grayling and Steven Pinker, are primarily historical: they trace the emergence of human rights to a particular time and place, and they try to show how that emergence changed the world for the better. The next two chapters, by Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah, are normative arguments about the philosophical foundations of human rights. The final three chapters, by John Borrows, Baroness Helena Kennedy, and Germaine Greer, are innovative applications of human rights to indigenous peoples, globalization and international law, and women. Wide ranging in its philosophical perspectives and implications, this volume is an indispensable contribution to the contemporary thinking on the rights that must be safeguarded for all people.