Reimagining Human Rights: Religion and the Common Good (Moral Traditions) - Softcover

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William O’Neill, SJ, is a professor emeritus of social ethics at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University. He held the Jesuit Chair at Georgetown University from 2003-04 and has served on the editorial board of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics and the board of directors of Theological Studies. He is the author of numerous articles on moral theology and ethics and The Ethics of Our Climate: Hermeneutics and Ethical Theory (Georgetown University Press, 1994). He is currently serving as a member of the Mission and Identity Task Force for the Jesuit Refugee Service, stationed in Nairobi, Kenya.

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Theology Religion and Ethics

"O'Neill's reminder that human rights, religion, and the common good are intrinsically linked to the safeguarding of human dignity is key to deepening our common human experience."—Elias O. Opongo, SJ, director of the Centre for Research, Training and Publications, HekimaInstitute of Peace Studies and International Relations, Catholic University of Eastern Africa

"An original and compelling reimagining of human rights. O'Neill reverses the hermeneutical flow so as to rethink human rights as the grammar of dissent and in so doing opens an exciting and challenging new seam of inquiry about our obligations to each other in a pluralist and global context."—Linda Hogan, professor of ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin

Jeremy Bentham described the idea of human rights as "rhetorical nonsense." In Reimagining Human Rights, William R. O'Neill, SJ, 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."

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, Jrgen Habermas, and John Rawls and local or ethnocentric conceptions of the common good of 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. They also allow victims of abuses to tell their stories.

O'Neill shows how the rhetoric of human rights can dismantle old narratives of power and advance new ones, reconstructing victims' 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.

William R. O'Neill, SJ, is a professor emeritus of social ethics at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University. He is the author of numerous works on moral theology and ethics, including The Ethics of Our Climate: Hermeneutics and Ethical Theory. He is currently serving with the Jesuit Refugee Service in Nairobi, Kenya.