Unfinished Jobs: Working Papers Series
Some time ago, I remember coming across a fascinating description of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. This was how Mary Ann Glendon called it: an “unfinished job”. Glendon herself has authored a book lamenting how often ‘rights talk’ fails to find its parallel conceptual complement: duties and responsibilities by persons. In one sense, this was what she was referring to: that many of the normative discourses defended by the UN and appealed to by agencies or activists beg for more warrants, both conceptual and empirical.
All this calls to mind such works as Jacques Maritain’s The Rights of Man and Natural Law or John Finnis’ Natural Law and Natural Rights. Both seek to defend a basis for human rights, and are worth studying and developing. But the work before us is not merely justificatory. Progressive thinking draws on a variety of epistemologies and sources, even if we should not neglect the demonstration of foundations. Before Eleanor Roosevelt gathered philosophers and theorists to craft the Declaration, a friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the science fiction writer H. G. Wells, had published through Penguin something like a list of human rights in his The Rights of Man or What Are We Fighting For, in which were proposed a set of values to stall the descent into barbarism evident in the World Wars. Wells sent Franklin Roosevelt a copy. No doubt, some of its ideas then found its way into the eventual Declaration.
This suggests two things. Firstly, ideas can come from different places; it is not likely that any single discipline exhausts all there is to know, and to discover. Secondly, ideas can develop through building on earlier ideas from a different discipline; not all thinking is about displacing other paradigms or other disciplines, even though ideas daily compete for survival. With these two inclusive principles in mind, we have initiated this Working Paper Series, which features working papers from all disciplines, on a variety of themes relevant to the mission of the United Nations, broadly interpreted and of varying lengths. Some of these are full research papers, others conference pieces, other are short notes, and others are experimental memos, still others unconventional proposals, most penultimate drafts, a few with typos, a couple with missing footnotes and references—all unsettled ideas, unfinished jobs. As and when these find a place in publications, they may be taken down, leaving but a trace of their published destinations, while new pieces replace them.
Many of these submissions will be by our esteemed Fellows of the Blue Capper Programme (FBCap), whose appointment as Fellows comes with an obligation to be intellectually productive, although we would also welcome enquiries about possible submissions from interested persons outside the Fellowship.
- Dr. Jude Chua Soo Meng FBCap, “Unfinished Jobs: Working Paper Series” Editor