Human Rights, Global Justice, and the Problem of Perspective
Dans le cadre des midis de l’éthique, le CRÉUM est fier d’accueillir Jennifer Szende.
En voici un résumé:
This paper examines a worry about the epistemology of global injustice, which I call the problem of perspective for a theory of global justice. The paper relies on an analogy between a prominent feminist critique of multiculturalism, and a related epistemic problem in global justice. One part of Okin’s worry about multiculturalism is that the outsider perspective on a culture is particularly ill-suited to determine the value of a practice to its participants. Yet liberal multiculturalism aims to protect multicultural practices only to the extent that they are valuable to (and chosen by) the participants. Similarly for the case of global justice: humanitarian intervention aims to protect individuals from actual harm (defined in human rights terms), but to do so only to the extent that the individuals concerned view it as a form of harm. Failure to respond to these concerns would leave both multiculturalism and humanitarian intervention open to an objection that they are paternalistic or neo-colonial in character. Both theories require, from an outsider perspective, judgments about internal justice or injustice, and both face considerable linguistic, and cultural relativist barriers in addition to the outsider perspective. Finally, both seem to face a particular concern about how women and « minorities within minorities » will fare, given that these groups are particularly unlikely to be accepted as speaking on behalf of the culture.
Pour obtenir une version écrite de la présentation (en anglais), communiquez avec Valéry: valery.giroux@umontreal.ca
