Child Rights

Butler (philosophy, Indiana U.-Purdue U. Fort Wayne) brings together a group of philosophy, education, psychology, political science, and other scholars from the US, Canada, and the UK who examine the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and opposition to it. In 11 essays, they consider the Convention in terms of areas other than international human rights law, describing pedagogical, political, psychological, anthropological, and ethical considerations. They explore the way the global children's rights movement has positively interpreted and used the Convention, including in education, teaching children's rights education, and protecting children from violence; criticism of the Convention and its implementation, from countries that have ratified it and those that have not, including the US and Canada; and children's rights and their violation and implementation in the developing world and the implementation of human rights norms by humanitarian organizations. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Clark Butler, who holds a PhD from the University of Southern California, is a Purdue University philosophy professor based on the Indiana-Purdue Fort Wayne campus (IPFW) and director of the IPFW Center for Applied Ethics. His previous books include Human Rights Ethics: A Rational Approach (Purdue University Press 2008), which proposes a contemporary normative ethical theory in the place of natural law ethics, utilitarianism, and other classical normative ethic theories. His most recent book, The Dialectical Method: A Treatise Hegel Never Wrote (Prometheus Books 2011), reveals a research agenda aimed at continuing the German philosopher's work in the twenty-first century.