Human Rights and Common Good: Introduction

Abstract:     
This Introduction to my Human Rights and Common Good: Collected Essays Volume III (Oxford University Press 2011), published in the United Kingdom in early April, and in the United States in early May 2011, introduces the volume’s 22 published and unpublished essays, and follows the volume’s division into six Parts: Human Rights and Common Good: General Theory; Justice and Punishment; War and Justice; Autonomy, Euthanasia, and Justice; Abortion, IVF, and Justice; and Marriage, Justice, and the Common Good. The first half of the Introduction is, in effect, a brief new essay on the general theoretical issues involved in human rights and in laws and other articulations of such rights. After a discussion of conceptual issues, the argument moves to a vindication of rights against sceptical doubts about them. This involves an extension of the Introduction to Volume II, by a revisiting of what is involved in one’s unity and identity as a human person. Indeed, the Introduction, like the volume, intersects with the Introductions to, and contents of, each of the other volumes in the five-volume set, which is published just before the second edition of Natural Law and Natural Rights, reformatted to accompany the set and incorporating a 65-page Postscript. The Collected Essays are I Reason in Action, II Intention and Identity, III Human Rights and Common Good, IV Philosophy of Law, V Religion and Public Reasons. Each volume includes the index for the set, and the author’s bibliography.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 17

Keywords: philosophy of law, moral and political philosophy, theology, religious ethics, Catholic Church

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