Onora O'neill Quotes

even states with robust laws and a strong commitment to human rights can find it hard to secure all rights for all persons who are (wholly or partly, continuously or episodically) within their borders.

What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics.19

In modern democracies, press freedom was being used as a cloak to shield media conglomerates’ domination of public discussion ‘in which misinformation may be peddled uncorrected and in which reputations may be selectively shredded or magnified. A free press is not an unconditional good.’ When the media mislead, she added, ‘the wells of public discourse and public life are poisoned’. Dr Onora O’Neill

Onora O’Neill (1987) argues that idealization occurs when, in the process of abstraction required by theorizing, we represent objects in ways that distort them. The distortion usually occurs by falsely attributing (putatively) positive features to the object or by downplaying negative ones. As feminist philosophers have consistently argued, practices of abstracting about objects in order to theorize about them risk—under unjust background conditions, at least—not random forms of distortion but rather emphasizing attributes that are associated with the dominant or that justify domination.

Treating rights as fundamental gives prominence to the perspective of victims, and lends itself all too readily to an emphasis on the form of rectificatory justice of most concern to victims, namely compensation.

As the philosopher Baroness Onora O’Neill has said, ‘If we are to place or refuse trust we need either unmediated evidence of others

As the philosopher Baroness Onora O’Neill has said, ‘If we are to place or refuse trust we need either unmediated evidence of others’ honesty, competence or reliability or mediated evidence that can be checked.

Hence, if our fundamental commitment is to treat others as agents who could adopt the very principles that we act on, then we must be committed equally to strategies and policies that enable them to become and to remain agents.

Well-placed trust grows out of active inquiry rather than blind acceptance.

Rawls also saw ethical agreement on a certain ideal of citizenship as the basis for determining principles of justice.

The striking silence about duties in many contemporary discussions of rights no doubt reflects immense cultural shifts from a world centred on social and ethical duties, to one in which legal requirements and their enforcement by states are seen as fundamental, and in which individuals are commonly seen as having rights – but little is said about their duties.

Roughly speaking, I believe, much abstract cosmopolitan thinking has difficulty in moving on from abstraction to a discussion of institutions because it treats the category of rights as fundamental. The difficulty begins to show as soon as we ask who bears obligations to meet these rights and whether all human beings have the same obligations.

Agents and agencies can only be obliged to act in ways for which they have an adequate set of capabilities.

My own view is that if we want to establish intellectually robust norms for health policies it would be preferable to start from a systematic account of obligations rather than of rights.

At times Kant uses a fiercely sarcastic rhetoric29 to chastise those who try to purvey the illusion that reasoning could be without all structure or discipline and delude themselves that this ‘lawless’ freedom will be liberating, and that freedom is all there is to reasoning. He had clear targets in mind, including the fans of religious enthusiasm (Schwärmerei) and of exaggerated views of the powers of genius; today his targets might include a fair range of post-modernists, new-agers and deconstructionists.

Because anarchic, ‘lawless’ thinking is no more than babble, it is defenceless in the face of the claims of superstition, of enthusiasm and of the ideas extolled by those who peddle religious and political dogmas.