HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE MORAL RESPONSIBILITIES OF CORPORATE AND PUBLIC SECTOR ORGANISATIONS pptx

[...]... than the morality of basic rights, and that the issues of the relationship between rights and markets is a matter of determining what falls on the rights side of the equation and imposing this dogmatically on the lesser area of business and economics, so clearing the decks for a more enlightened examination of the human rights obligations of organisations 3 THE PUBLIC SECTOR AND RIGHTS Much of the analysis... and institutions In considering the moral obligations of organisations arising from human rights, we have no ready-made basis in secure knowledge of the content and nature of human rights This chapter considers some of these factors – statism, legalism and epistemology – that inhibit the use of human rights discourse in non-state contexts, and asks what sort of human rights and what sort of human rights. .. on Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp 315-334 MORAL DIMENSIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS 13 Other factors that raise doubts about the applicability of human rights to the moral responsibilities of organisations derive from the capture of human rights by legal institutions and ideologies The progressive legalisation of human rights goes with an assumption that human rights are within the. .. tied to the concept of rules and entitlements, and human rights, as the most important of rights, are tightly associated with the strongest mode of rules and entitlements, namely law The assumption is that it is the duty of governments to see that the rights identified as human rights are expressed in and guaranteed by laws and the duty of courts to see that these laws actually do protect human rights. .. establishing what the moral obligations arising from human rights might be and how they could change our perception of the role of human rights in the contemporary world This takes us deep into some traditional questions about the nature and scope of human rights, and brings fresh insights into possible advantages and disadvantages of assigning human rights obligations to private and public sector organisations. .. derives from the special duty of public organisations to act impartially in the service of the public They also tend to have greater human rights protections for their employees than private organisations, which reduces dissonance between the principles that govern their external activities and their internal management However, the contrast between the private and the public sectors in these and other respects... considering the extent to which human rights can serve to identify the moral responsibilities of organisations, I have indicated that we must take account of the political contexts in which they originated and were developed If we trace human rights to the tradition of natural rights as they were fashioned by political philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the rights from which human rights. .. between the operations of the state and the operations of private organisations, particularly business organisations It might be thought that public sector organisations, such as government departments, defence and police organisations, and publicly owned utilities, fall clearly on the government side of the dichotomy Many public sector organisations are in the business of creating and implementing the. .. aspects of human rights relativity In their moral dimensions, human rights are relative to the standing threats, the available remedies and the particular capacities of the candidates for bearers of the moral obligations that correlate with human rights: (1) Threat-relative A key role of human rights is to identify the specific type of evil that has to be guarded against Characteristically these threats... have over the legalism of human rights by drawing attention to the function of social rules, and the expectations that go with them in grounding the idea of entitlements that is so vital to the distinctiveness of the discourse of rights That done, however, there remains a sense that human rights are most at home in the legal or quasi-legal world of rules of societal norms that have some sort of official . applicability of human rights to the moral responsibilities of organisations derive from the capture of human rights by legal institutions and ideologies. The progressive legalisation of human rights. examination of the goals and culture of different types of organisation. Articulating the moral aspects of human rights involves broadening the range of human rights discourse and taking it beyond the. listed at the end of this volume. Human Rights and the Moral Responsibilities of Corporate and Public Sector Organisations Edited by TOM CAMPBELL Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles