Search results for ""Author William R. O'Neill""

An interpretation of human rights that centers on the rhetorical—and religious—power of testimony. Jeremy Bentham described the idea of human rights as “rhetorical nonsense.” In Reimagining Human Rights, William O’Neill shows that the rhetorical aspect of human rights is in fact crucial. By examining how victims and their advocates embrace the rhetoric of human rights to tell their stories, he presents an interpretation of human rights “from below,” showing what victims of atrocity and advocates do with rights. Drawing on African writings that center around victims’ stories—including Desmond Tutu’s on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission—and modern Roman Catholic social teaching, O’Neill reconciles the false dichotomy between the individualistic perspective of the human rights theories of Immanuel Kant, Jürgen Habermas, and John Rawls and local or ethnocentric conceptions of the common good in Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty. He shows that the testimony of victims leads us to a new conception of the common good, based on rights as narrative grammar—that is, rights are not only a grammar of dissent against atrocity but let new stories be told. O’Neill shows how the rhetoric of human rights can dismantle old narratives of power and advance new ones, reconstructing victim’s claims, often in a religious key, along the way. He then applies this new approach to three areas: race and mass incarceration in the United States, the politics of immigration and refugee policy, and ecological responsibility and our duties to the next generation.

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In this book, William O'Neill, SJ, offers an interpretation of the nature and scope of practical reasoning in light of postmodern philosophical criticism. He charts a via media between the abstract formalism of neo-Kantian morality and relativist interpretations of neo-Aristotelian ethics. The three parts of the book treat the eclipse of the classical Aristotelian conception of practical reason; the Kantian heritage in the modern moral theories of John Rawls and R.M. Hare; and, the hermeneutical retrieval of a moral interpretation of the world. Drawing upon the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, modern analytical philosophy, and the discourse ethics of Jurgen Habermas, O'Neill offers a critical reconstruction of practical reason which upholds the primacy of moral community while recognizing the ethical import of historical and cultural difference. The final chapter applies the preceding hermeneutical critique to the question of the distinctiveness of Christian ethics in the writings of Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Josef Fuchs, and Bruno Schuller. This original contribution will be of special interest to students and teachers of moral philosophy and theology.

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