Victims' Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights

Abstract

Abstract Victims' Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights addresses a set of critical topics that victims' stories of human rights abuse raise but that philosophers have thus far neglected: paradigms of victimhood and unjustifiable exclusions from the category of victim; narrative structures as constraints on victims' stories and as vehicles for articulating human rights norms; the role of emotional responses to victims' stories in discerning their normative significance; empathy with victims' stories as a pathway to moral understanding and human rights commitment; and the need for an ethical framework for obtaining victims' stories and for civil society institutions that can disseminate these stories for purposes of advancing human rights. This book addresses these concerns by analyzing the rhetorical resources for and constraints on victims' ability to articulate their stories and by clarifying how their stories can contribute to enlarged understandings of human rights protections and deepened commitments to realizing human rights. It theorizes the normative content that victims' stories can convey and the bearing of that normative content on human rights. Throughout the book, published victims' stories are analyzed in conjunction with philosophical arguments. In short, this book mobilizes philosophical theory to illuminate victims' stories and appeals to victims' stories to enrich the philosophy of human rights.

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