Performative Rights and Situationist Ethics

Abstract

Recent critiques of rights have enabled alternative understandings of their role in contemporary politics. In this article, I focus on the emergence of a performative understanding of rights, which conceptualises rights claims as reiterative acts that remake the protections and privileges marked out by rights. This promising reconstruction of rights requires a rethinking of the ethical justification of rights claims. If rights claims are creative political acts, rather than especially important duties, a justification focused on certainty and constraint will not do. Yet, we must still ask: what is a good rights claim? I argue, first, that a performative account of rights requires an ethical justification that embraces contingency while still providing an account of good political creativity, and, second, that focusing on the use of normative claims to address specific problems, which I term a situationist ethics—drawing on the philosophy of John Dewey, provides better grounding for performative rights claims.

Prison and Love: The Role of Affection and Rehabilitative Actions in Reducing Recidivism and Beyond

“…Thus, considering such a specific context as that of prison allows us to illuminate an essential dimension of social love itself, that of representing (and doing) a "right". Love as a right, and even more as a "performative right", realized through situated action and potentially having a disruptive political value (Hoover 2019;Zivi 2008), clearly transcends utilitarian including the goal of preventing recidivism. It is a dimension able to profoundly enrich our understanding of the social, yet it remains largely unexplored.…”

Rhetoric and Rights: Citizenship and the Politics of Persuasion

“…From this observation, a new and burgeoning literature has developed. Since the publication of Making Rights Claims , the field of performative rights has expanded, with theorists investigating their specifically feminist dimensions (Eleveld, 2015), how rights claims engage with structural orders either by making demands of them (reform) or by acting in defiance (rupture) (Eristavi, 2021) and by specifying in great depth their ethical dimension (Hoover, 2019). In a similar vein that I will discuss further below, Ben Golder (2015) has refined the analytic framework for rights-claiming by distinguishing between ‘tactics’ and ‘strategy’.…”

“…Finally, just because it was successful does not mean that this example offers a firm guide to the future. As Joe Hoover (2019: 264) puts it, ‘judgements we carry over from past experience are dead judgements, tools that may help us navigate the world but not final valuations that determine our new experiences’. Acting ethically and politically requires us to take responsibility for our own actions.…”

Framing ethical issues associated with the UK COVID-19 contact tracing app: exceptionalising and narrowing the public ethics debate

“…Furthermore, when applied to the public arena, the sociology of ethics literature also intersects literature that focuses on ‘performative ethics’. This term has been appropriated by scholars and disciplines in various ways, but ultimately relates to the idea that narratives (including those in the public arena) have an important role to play in creating and shaping moral futures through social processes (Edwards et al, 2015 ; Hoover, 2019 ; Miller, 2019 ; Santis & Zavattaro, 2019 ).…”