How should human rights be conceived?

Abstract

Outside the sphere of positive law, the idiom of human rights, like those of natural law and natural rights, picks out a special class of moral concerns that are among the most weighty of all as well as unrestricted and broadly sharable. It is more specific than the other two idioms by presenting all and only human beings as (equally) sources of moral concern and by being focused on threats that are in some sense official. The latter specification can be explicated as follows: By postulating a right to X as a human right, we assert that every society (or other relevant social system) ought to be so (re)organized that all its members enjoy secure access to X (with the required degrees of security being relative to what is feasible overall). By not organizing itself in this way, a society expresses official disrespect for the human right in question — esp. if insecure access to X is due to the threat of official violations, i.e. to persons’ being denied X or deprived of X by those in positions of political authority. The members of such a society violate a negative duty of justice: the duty not to participate in the imposition of unjust social institutions, if they do not do what they reasonably can do toward initiating and supporting appropriate institutional reform. The proposed understanding of human rights undercuts one important objection to the admissibility of social, economic, and cultural human rights, as these, too, can now be understood as entailing only a negative duty: not (avoidably) to impose upon one’s compatriots a social order under which they lack secure access to basic necessities. Moreover, one can argue that even classic civil rights have social and economic aspects: To secure freedom from inhuman and degrading treatment, for instance, a society may need to do more than introduce and enforce appropriate criminal statutes. It may also need to establish adequate social and economic safeguards, ensuring perhaps that domestic servants are literate, know about their rights and options, and have some economic security to mitigate the fear of losing their job.