The United Kingdom and Human Rights - College of Social ...

228 People and Education for Human Rights
operate unless the facts to be analysed are made available and that
this will inevitably require some teaching.
20 The distinguished exception is Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue: A
Study in Moral Theory, (1981) (Duckworth, 2nd ed. 1985). Macintyre's
post-script (p. 273) explains his three-stage account of the virtues. He
first treats the virtues as qualities necessary to achieve the goods
internal to practices (the latter being on-going modes of human
activity within which ends have to be discovered and rediscovered
and means devised to pursue them in the process of which new
ends and new conceptions of ends are generated). He believes that
the good life for man consists in seeking that life and that the virtues
enable understanding of that life—thereby reaching the second stage
of his account—namely, the virtues as qualities contributing to the
good of a whole life. Finally, Macintyre relates the virtues to the
pursuits of good for human beings rather than qua individuals in
their particular communities. Only in those moral particularities with
their on-going traditions can the conception of good be elaborated
(pp. 219-221). Macintyre's approach is the ethical equivalent of the
new historiography of Pocock and Skinner discussed in my first
Lecture.
21 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, op. cit. VI.ii.2.11 and 3.3, at pp. 231
and 235.
22 See Ian Lister, Teaching and Learning about Human Rights, Schools
Education Division, Council of Europe, Strasbourg, 1984 (DECS/EGT
(84) 27). There is a good bibliography at pp. 39 et seq.
23 Law and Order, (Stevens, 1985), pp. 138 and 161. Dahrendorf's ideas
are much influenced by Jurgen Habermas, especially his view of
socialised individuals being tied to each other in an integrated society
by "a network of co-operation by the medium of communication,"
quoted in Dahrendorf at p. 51. See also Dahrendorf's "Paper to the
Commission on Citizenship Seminar," April 14/15, 1989. Here,
Dahrendorf saw citizenship as "the set of entitlements which is
associated with full membership of a society." He also accepted that
there were separate obligations, not a bargain, including obeying the
law and paying taxes. Desirable actions by citizens, for example,
voluntary charitable activity and participation, were a different
concept, which should not be confused with the obligations of a
citizen.
24 See Social Policy in the Twentieth Century, (Hutchinson, London, 5th
ed. by A. M. Rees, 1985).
25 See Peter Kellner, "Forging a new political vocabulary" in The
Independent, October 17, 1988. "Charter" is another such word taken
up by the Labour Party in United Kingdom: Charter of Human Rights: A
Discussion Document for the Labour Movement, (London, February