- Title
- Rights as trumps in African communitarian ethics
- Creator
- Nwogbo, Johnbosco
- Subject
- Communitarianism Human rights Social values
- Date
- 2017
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Masters
- Type
- MA
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10353/12282
- Identifier
- vital:39249
- Description
- The notion of rights is among the most basic ideas of contemporary political philosophy on the continent and elsewhere. Although rights are common-place in political philosophy it is fair to say that the discussion around it has been nothing short of contested. On the whole, there have been two kinds of questions to which most of the discussion about rights in political philosophy have been answers, namely, (i) what are rights?, and (ii) to what do people have rights? The first has to do with the nature of rights, while the second has to the nature of that to which people may be said to have rights. This research falls neatly within the parlance of the first kind of questions (i.e., the question of what rights are). Specifically, in this research, I am concerned with the question of whether the radical and moderate African communitarian rights theses of Ifeanyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye measure up to what rights are commonly understood to be. I argue that if rights are trumps, which override competing societal and communal considerations, then Menkiti’s and Gyekye’s theories of rights fall short of this fairly standard and typical conception of rights.
- Format
- 148 leaves
- Format
- Publisher
- University of Fort Hare
- Publisher
- Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
- Language
- English
- Rights
- University of Fort Hare
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View Details | SOURCE1 | complete research for cd submission.pdf | 1 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details |