Direction for [ Question No: 1 To 2 ] :
Read the passage below and answer the questions that follow based on your understanding of the passage.
The Indian scholar Vandana Shiva applies a socialist approach to women's rights in the Third World, condemning the ill effects of a neoliberal approach to economic development on both women and the environment in the Third World. In Staying Alive : Development, Ecology and Women (1989), she maintains that development projects represent the continuation of the process of colonialization. Rejecting the premise - embraced by architects of the United Nations Decade for Women - that women's economic status would improve thanks to expanding development, Shiva argues that the Western understanding of progress was at the root of women's increasing underdevelopment. She details how development projects have displaced women, in particular, from their sources of economic subsistence. Deploring the way in which women's close association with nature is seen as passive and unproductive, she calls for the recovery of the feminine principle to challenge the legitimacy of patriarchal capital accumulation and its destructive ecological effects. From a different perspective, the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty considers in "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality" (1993), Western rationalist and foundationalist positions of universal rights (as defended by Plato, Kant and others) as outmoded. Those views, in Rorty's opinion are, despite their theoretical and universalist claims, de facto exclusive ; for only rational individuals are considered human beings. According to this perspective, Rorty claims, Muslims and women may be easily excluded from the rationalist equation of rights. He thus encourages those who oppose oppression to concentrate their energies on manipulating sentiments. For our best hope is one sentimental education, rather than on the command of reason. This would favour the possibility of "powerful people gradually ceasing to oppress others, or ceasing to countenance the oppression of others, out of mere niceness, rather than out of obedience to the moral law." Unlike Rorty, the American scholars Rhoda E. Howard and Jack Donnelly advocate, in "Liberalism and Human Rights: A Necessary Connection" (1996), a universal liberal and "egalitarian" position on rights. They maintain that internationally recognized liberal human rights, as laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Human Rights Covenants, are the only legitimate human rights standards. They defend a liberal view of Individual rights, against both the libertarian strand of liberalism, and conservative "communitarian" rights, by arguing, for example, that individuals' rights to property are constrained by individuals rights to social justice. "When the full range of internationally recognized human rights is protected," they write, "when individuals are treated with equal concern, communities can and do thrive."
