Changing Ethos of Human Rights

Edited by Hoda Mahmoudi, Research Professor and Chair, The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace, University of Maryland College Park, Alison Brysk, Distinguished Professor, Department of Global Studies and Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara and Kate Seaman, Assistant Director, The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace, University of Maryland, US

‘We live in a moment of overlapping crises: in a radically unequal and dangerously warming world, populism, xenophobia, and closing space for dissent are the background conditions to which the acute calamities of a global pandemic and its dire economic consequences have been added. These intersecting emergencies have left human rights advocates searching for frameworks capable of generating new visions bold enough to tackle the challenges we face. Moving beyond legal foundations, The Changing Ethos of Human Rights, edited by Hoda Mahmoudi, Alison Brysk and Kate Seaman, offers perspectives on rights rooted in traditions such as philosophy, spirituality, and feminism. In these spaces, the contributors find an ethos of care that centers the interdependence of all human beings, offering a pathway forward in the midst of peril.’

• Contents:Introduction to The Changing Ethos of Human Rights 1Hoda Mahmoudi1 Values and human rights: implications of anemerging discourse on virtue ethics 14Michael L. Penn2 Dignity and treating others merely as means 35Samuel Kerstein3 Making rights rhetoric work: constructing care ina post-liberal world 52Alison Brysk4 Race and feminist care ethics: intersectionality as method 66Parvati Raghuram5 Difficult care: examining women’s efforts in theIslamic Republic of Iran 93Hoda Mahmoudi6 Empathy, caring, and the defense of human rightsin a digital world 111Kate Seaman7 Cultural heritage, cultural rights and care ethics 136Matthew S. WeinertIndex 157