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.

AcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1: Two Victim Paradigms and the Problem of ?Impure? Victims1. Two Victim ParadigmsA. The Pathetic Victim ParadigmB. The Heroic Victim Paradigm2. Controversial - ?Impure? - VictimsA. Trafficked Sex WorkersB. Death Row Inmates3. Parameters of InnocenceA. Getting Real about InnocenceB. The Victim Paradigms RevisitedC. Reconceiving the Innocence of Victims4. Reclaiming Victim DiscourseChapter 2: Narrative Structures, Narratives of Abuse, And Human Rights1. The Amsterdam/Bruner Account of Narrative2. Narrative Regimentation, Social Exclusion, and Truth Forfeiture3. Hayden White's Account of Narrative and Closure4. Spelman's Account of Normativity in a Victim's Story5. Strejilevich's Skepticism about Normativity in Victims' Stories6. Varieties of Moral Closure7. Moral Closure without Moral ResolutionChapter 3: Learning from Victims' Stories: The Promise and Problems of Emotional Understanding1. Narrative Artifice: Arbitrary and Non-Rational?2. Affective Intelligence and Moral Understanding3. Scenes from a Child Soldier's Story4. Imaginative Resistance to a Child Soldier's Story5. Emotionally Understanding a Child Soldier's Story6. Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and Affective UnderstandingChapter 4: Empathy and the Meanings of Human Rights in Human Lives1. Peter Goldie's Critique of Empathy2. A Conception of Empathy for Moral Philosophy3. Why Empathy Is (Isn't) a Moral PowerA. Empathy and Altruistic ActionB. Empathy and Moral Understanding4. Empathy, Embodiment, and Suffering5. A Woman in Berlin Eight Weeks in the Conquered City6. Empathy, Victims' Stories, and Human RightsChapter 5: The Ethics and Politics of Putting Victims' Stories to Work1. The Problem of Victim Derogation and Blaming2. The Ethics of Using Victims' Stories to Promote Human RightsA. Aid and Research ProjectsB. Justice Projects3. Ethical Politics: Civil Society and Advancing Human RightsA. Ethical Practices Within Human Rights GroupsB. Ethical Relations Among Human Rights NGOs4. Concluding ReflectionsReferencesIndex