Relativism and Human Rights: A Theory of Pluralist Universalism

This  is an innovative contribution to the philosophy of human rights.  Considering both legal and philosophical scholarship, the views here  bear an importance on the legitimacy of international politics and  international law. As a result of more than 10 years of research, this  revised edition engages with current debates through the help of new  sections.
Pluralistic universalism considers  that, while formal filtering criteria constitute unavoidable  requirements for the production of potentially valid arguments, the  exemplarity of judgmental activity, in its turn, provides a pluralistic  and retrospective reinterpretation for the fixity of such criteria.  While speech formal standards grounds the thinnest possible  presuppositions we can make as humans, the discursive exemplarity of  judgments defends a notion of validity which is both contextually  dependent and "subjectively universal". According to this approach,  human rights principles are embedded within our linguistic argumentative  practice. It is precisely from the intersubjective and dialogical  relation among speakers that we come to reflect upon those same  conditions of validity of our arguments. Once translated into national  and regional constitutional norms, the discursive validity of exemplar  judgments postulates the philosophical necessity for an ideal of  legal-constitutional pluralism, challenging all those attempts trying to  frustrate both horizontal (state to state) and vertical  (supra-national-state-social) on-going debates on human rights.

On  the first edition of this book: “Claudio Corradetti’s book is a  thoughtful attempt to find an adequate theoretical foundation for human  rights. Its approach is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on issues  in analytical philosophy as well as contemporary political theorists,  and the result is a densely argued text aimed at scholars … .” (Andrew  Lambert, Metapsychology Online Reviews, Vol. 14 (3), January, 2010)