[Download] "Human Wrongs and the Tragedy of Victimhood (Response to Human Rights and the Politics of Victimhood) (Article by Robert Meister in This Issue, P. 91)" by Ethics & International Affairs # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Human Wrongs and the Tragedy of Victimhood (Response to Human Rights and the Politics of Victimhood) (Article by Robert Meister in This Issue, P. 91)
- Author : Ethics & International Affairs
- Release Date : January 01, 2002
- Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 296 KB
Description
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. W. H. Auden (1) No serious student of victimhood and injustice can fail to appreciate their complicated origins and problematic legacies. For individuals and societies emerging from communal violence, oppression, and atrocity, the quest for moral regeneration--through acknowledgment, understanding, and transformation--is as difficult and perplexing as it is pressing. (2) Challenging moral questions abound in the aftermath of human wrongs that admit no easy answers. Indeed, the ethics and politics of transition have been widely contested in theory and practice, by people who share the same basic moral/political concerns to redeem the suffering of victims and to forge a future that never again repeats the violations of the past. In the case of South Africa, for example, while some view the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as the institutional embodiment of an innovative conception of "restorative justice" that can serve as a foundational pillar for an emergent human rights culture, others see it mainly as a morally flawed political compromise of victims' justice that serves only to perpetuate the unjust social legacy of apartheid. (3) Even without the cynics, the field of ethical debate about the politics of transition is strewn with moral remainders, and is marked by a high degree of ambivalence and crookedness--that is, by the qualities that characterize the state of transition itself. (4)