Victims' Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights

by Diana Tietjens Meyers

Overview

Victim's Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights takes on a set of questions suggested by the worldwide persistence of human rights abuse and the prevalence of victims' stories in human rights campaigns, truth commissions, and international criminal tribunals: What conceptions of victims are presumed in contemporary human rights discourse? How do conventional narrative templates fail victims of human rights abuse and resist raising novel human rights issues? What is empathy, and how can victims frame their stories to overcome empathetic obstacles and promote commitment to human rights? How can victims' stories be used ethically in the service of human rights?

The 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-including stories of torture, slavery, genocide, rape in wartime, and child soldiering-are analyzed in conjunction with philosophical arguments. This book mobilizes philosophical theory to illuminate victims' stories and appeals to victims' stories to enrich the philosophy of human rights.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199930401
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/12/2016
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	1,158,317
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Diana Tietjens Meyers is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at University of Connecticut, Storrs; author of several books including Gender in the Mirror: Cultural Imagery and Women's Agency (2002).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Chapter 1: Two Victim Paradigms and the Problem of "Impure" Victims
1. Two Victim Paradigms
A. The Pathetic Victim Paradigm
B. The Heroic Victim Paradigm
2. Controversial - "Impure" - Victims
A. Trafficked Sex Workers
B. Death Row Inmates
3. Parameters of Innocence
A. Getting Real about Innocence
B. The Victim Paradigms Revisited
C. Reconceiving the Innocence of Victims
4. Reclaiming Victim Discourse

Chapter 2: Narrative Structures, Narratives of Abuse, And Human Rights
1. The Amsterdam/Bruner Account of Narrative
2. Narrative Regimentation, Social Exclusion, and Truth Forfeiture
3. Hayden White's Account of Narrative and Closure
4. Spelman's Account of Normativity in a Victim's Story
5. Strejilevich's Skepticism about Normativity in Victims' Stories
6. Varieties of Moral Closure
7. Moral Closure without Moral Resolution

Chapter 3: Learning from Victims' Stories: The Promise and Problems of Emotional Understanding
1. Narrative Artifice: Arbitrary and Non-Rational?
2. Affective Intelligence and Moral Understanding
3. Scenes from a Child Soldier's Story
4. Imaginative Resistance to a Child Soldier's Story
5. Emotionally Understanding a Child Soldier's Story
6. Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and Affective Understanding

Chapter 4: Empathy and the Meanings of Human Rights in Human Lives
1. Peter Goldie's Critique of Empathy
2. A Conception of Empathy for Moral Philosophy
3. Why Empathy Is (Isn't) a Moral Power
A. Empathy and Altruistic Action
B. Empathy and Moral Understanding
4. Empathy, Embodiment, and Suffering
5. A Woman in Berlin Eight Weeks in the Conquered City
6. Empathy, Victims' Stories, and Human Rights

Chapter 5: The Ethics and Politics of Putting Victims' Stories to Work
1. The Problem of Victim Derogation and Blaming
2. The Ethics of Using Victims' Stories to Promote Human Rights
A. Aid and Research Projects
B. Justice Projects
3. Ethical Politics: Civil Society and Advancing Human Rights
A. Ethical Practices Within Human Rights Groups
B. Ethical Relations Among Human Rights NGOs
4. Concluding Reflections

References
Index

Editorial Reviews

"In this brilliant analysis of the role of victims' narratives in human rights law, Meyers draws on her vast expertise in the areas of ethics, narrative theory, social and political philosophy, moral psychology, and philosophy of law to bring fresh insights to all of these fields and to challenge predominant views of victimhood in ways that should change the way we think about—and respond to—victims of human rights violations." —Susan J. Brison, Eunice and Julian Cohen Professor for the Study of Ethics and Human Values and Professor of Philosophy, Dartmouth College

"Diana T. Meyers' new book contributes a passionate and intellectually sharp analysis of the stories of victims. Stories about torture, imprisonment, child soldiers, and war rape proliferate. But there is a dismaying tendency to derogate and blame victims in order to sustain a belief in a just world. Meyers' book, which is the fruit of years of engaged scholarship, finally puts to rest such dismaying tendencies. She argues for an empathetic engagement with victims' stories in order to understand the human meaning of human rights abuses, to better respond to such abuses and to take more adequate measures to prevent them in the future." —Robin May Schott, Senior Researcher, Danish Institute for International Studies

"This concise and subtle book examines the ethical dimensions of how we think about what it is to be a victim, what expectations and biases affect how we hear their stories, and what ethical constraints should guide us in making use of their accounts in human rights research and advocacy. Meyers taps an impressive range of sources—including philosophy, psychology, political and literary theory—in this perceptive and original study." — Margaret Urban Walker, Donald J. Schuenke Chair in Philosophy, Marquette University

"The strength of Meyers's account is that it begins and ends in experience. It does not, first, take formal or theoretical human-rights standards and try to 'fit' them into the experience of victims. Rather, she takes victims' experiences, as told in their own voices, and sees how human-rights norms both account for and fail to account for their stories. Indeed, her work lays the groundwork for hearing victims' stories in terms as close to their own as might be possible." —Hypatia Reviews Online

From the Publisher