Philosophers, activists, and radicals: a story of human rights and other scandals

Paradoxically, the political success of human rights is often taken to be its philosophical failing. From US interventions to International NGOs to indigenous movements, human rights have found a place in diverse political spaces, while being applied to disparate goals and expressed in a range of practices. This heteronomy is vital to the global appeal of human rights, but for traditional moral and political philosophy it is something of a scandal. This paper is an attempt to understand and theorize human rights on the terrain of the social actors who put them to use, particularly radical activists that have a more critical relationship to human rights. Attempting to avoid the philosophical pathology of demanding that the world reflect our conception of it, we base our reflection on the ambiguous, and potentially un-patterned, texture of human rights practice—taking seriously the idea that human rights express a relationship of power, importantly concerned with its legitimate arrangement and limitation. In both the philosophical literature and human rights activism, there seems to be a consensus on basic rights as undeniable moral principles of political legitimacy. This use of human rights is contrasted with radical social movements that reject this conception of rights as ideological and illegitimate, making specific reference to the Zapatista movement (Chiapas, Mexico) and the Landless Peasant Movement of Brazil (MST, from the Portuguese Movimento dos trabalhadores rurais Sem Terra), which are critical of the human rights discourse, but also make strategic use of the idea and offer alternative articulations of political legitimacy

Impregnation of La0.4Ce0.6O1.8–La0.4Sr0.6TiO3 as solid oxide fuel cell anode in H2S-containing fuels

Active anodes were fabricated via wet chemical impregnation of optimized amount of La0.4Sr0.6TiO3 (L4ST) into La0.4Ce0.6O1.8 (LDC) pre-infiltrated porous yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) matrix. Impregnations of 10 wt% LDC with 16 wt% L4ST significantly improved the performance of the fuel cell from 48 mW cm 122 for pure L4ST to 161 mW cm 122 for LDC\u2013L4ST at 900 \ub0C in H2. The contribution of the pre-loaded LDC to this improvement was investigated using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) as well as transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The measurement results indicated that pre-infiltrated LDC increased the activity of the anode more effectively by decreasing the total polarization resistance of the cell from 3.3 \u3a9 cm2 to 1.0 \u3a9 cm2 in humidified H2 at 900 \ub0C. More importantly, the LDC nano-deposits (<20 nm) behaved as an effective \u201cadhesive\u201d that substantially enhanced the wettability of L4ST on YSZ matrix, resulting in finer and more uniform structure of L4ST infiltrates. The LDC\u2013L4ST cells also demonstrated significantly improved performances in 0.5% H2S\u2013H2 and 0.5% H2S\u2013CH4 with higher stability than cells with pure L4ST anode.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye