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[Disability] justice dictated by the surfeit of love: Simone Weil in Nigeria

[Disability] justice dictated by the surfeit of love: Simone Weil in Nigeria
[Disability] justice dictated by the surfeit of love: Simone Weil in Nigeria
How is Nigeria’s failure to fulfil its obligations as a signatory of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to be appreciated or even resolved? Answers to this are sought through a seminal criticism of human rights, namely, Simone Weil’s 1942 essay Human Personality. Weil questioned the ability of human rights concepts to cause the powerful to develop the emotional dispositions of empathy for those who suffer. Weil’s insights provide a convincing explanation that the indifference of Nigerian authorities towards the Convention may be accounted for by the weakness of human rights discourse to foster human capacity for empathy and care for those who suffer. Weil’s criticisms will serve as a point of departure for a particular way to circumvent this inadequacy of human rights discourse to achieve disability justice in Nigeria through other means. I argue that Weil, through her concept of attention, grappled with and offers a consciousness of suffering and vulnerability that is not only uncommon to existing juridical human rights approaches, but is achievable through the active participation in the very forms of suffering and vulnerability in which amelioration is sought. To provide empirical content to this argument, I turn to a short-lived initiative of the Nigerian disability movement, which if ethico-politically refined and widely applied, can supply an action-theoretical grounding for and be combined with Weil’s work to elevate agitations for disability justice above human rights to the realm of human obligations.
0957-8536
1-22
Onazi, Oche
3a6ff118-0cfb-4985-b642-4cefe8bc3fac
Onazi, Oche
3a6ff118-0cfb-4985-b642-4cefe8bc3fac

Onazi, Oche (2017) [Disability] justice dictated by the surfeit of love: Simone Weil in Nigeria. Law and Critique, 28 (1), 1-22. (doi:10.1007/s10978-016-9191-2).

Record type: Article

Abstract

How is Nigeria’s failure to fulfil its obligations as a signatory of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to be appreciated or even resolved? Answers to this are sought through a seminal criticism of human rights, namely, Simone Weil’s 1942 essay Human Personality. Weil questioned the ability of human rights concepts to cause the powerful to develop the emotional dispositions of empathy for those who suffer. Weil’s insights provide a convincing explanation that the indifference of Nigerian authorities towards the Convention may be accounted for by the weakness of human rights discourse to foster human capacity for empathy and care for those who suffer. Weil’s criticisms will serve as a point of departure for a particular way to circumvent this inadequacy of human rights discourse to achieve disability justice in Nigeria through other means. I argue that Weil, through her concept of attention, grappled with and offers a consciousness of suffering and vulnerability that is not only uncommon to existing juridical human rights approaches, but is achievable through the active participation in the very forms of suffering and vulnerability in which amelioration is sought. To provide empirical content to this argument, I turn to a short-lived initiative of the Nigerian disability movement, which if ethico-politically refined and widely applied, can supply an action-theoretical grounding for and be combined with Weil’s work to elevate agitations for disability justice above human rights to the realm of human obligations.

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Accepted/In Press date: 1 April 2016
e-pub ahead of print date: 26 July 2016
Published date: 1 March 2017
Organisations: Southampton Law School

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 402490
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/402490
ISSN: 0957-8536
PURE UUID: b0811355-3354-4852-bee8-b67083847d43
ORCID for Oche Onazi: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-2776-1267

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Date deposited: 09 Nov 2016 13:54
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:19

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Author: Oche Onazi ORCID iD

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