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Simone Weil on the Injustice of Rights-Based Doctrines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Edward Andrew
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Abstract

This paper explores Simone Weil's objections to a philosophy grounded on human rights. Weil thinks impersonal justice cannot be expressed in terms of personal rights. Rights, for Weil, are personal possessions; they are claimed or borne by some subject or person (me, you, her or them). The right or the just, however, is not susceptible to possession. When one substitutes a personal pronoun for the definite article before the word right (my right or their right instead of the right), justice is articulated in the manner of liberal contractualism but is biased against a notion of impersonal justice which Weil champions. The incompatibility of Weil's understanding of justice and a rights-based notion of justice is the subject-matter investigated in this article.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , Winter 1986 , pp. 60 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1986

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References

Notes

1 McCloskey, H. J., “Rights,” Philosophical Quarterly, 15 (1965), 115–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar argues that rights should be understood as entitlements to something rather than claims against someone. But see Feinberg, J., Rights, Justice and the Bound of Liberty (Princeton: University Press, 1980), 151–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a refutation of this position.

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71 Ibid., pp. 38–39.

72 Ibid., p. 39.

73 Ibid., pp. 80, 85.