Institutionalising values: beyond human rights?

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.