Abstract

In Ethics for a Broken World (2011),Tim Mulgan invites us to partake in a series of lectures delivered in a fictional future on some of the political philosophies that dominate our current tradition. The future he asks us to imagine is one in which the world is ‘broken’. In the broken world, climate change has lead to intermittent and unpredictable periods of radical scarcity in which there are insufficient resources to guarantee the survival of all existing persons (8-12). We are also to imagine, rather plausibly in light of recent scientific discoveries, that we bear causal responsibility for this situation (9). Mulgan suggests that the device of the broken world ‘serves to highlight the contingency of our moral and political ideals, asking us to see our society and its ideals from the outside’ (ix). In this paper, I employ the device of the broken world to reflect on one of the most prominent ideals in contemporary affluent societies, namely that of human rights. In particular, I am interested in what sense the device of the broken world shows our ideal of human rights to be contingent, and what implications this might have for how we should understand and evaluate this ideal.