Human Rights－SEP

 First published Fri Feb 7, 2003; substantive revision Thu Apr 11, 2019

1. The General Idea of Human Rights
1. explain the general idea of human rights by identifying four defining features
1. Human rights are rights
   Rights focus on a freedom, protection, status, or benefit for the rightholders (Beitz 2009). The duties associated with human rights often require actions involving respect, protection, facilitation, and provision. Rights are usually mandatory in the sense of imposing duties on their addressees, but some legal human rights seem to do little more than declare high-priority goals and assign responsibility for their progressive realization.
1. A human rights advocate might wish to see human rights exist in all four way
1. a shared norm of actual human moralities
2. a justified moral norm supported by strong reasons
3. a legal right at the national level (where it might be referred to as a “civil” or “constitutional” right)
4. a legal right within international law
2. Human rights are plural
3. Human rights are universal
1.  This idea of universality needs several qualifications
1. some rights, such as the right to vote, are held only by adult citizens or residents and apply only to voting in one’s own country
2. the human right to freedom of movement may be taken away temporarily from a person who is convicted of committing a serious crime
3. some human rights treaties focus on the rights of vulnerable groups such as minorities, women, indigenous peoples, and children
4. Human rights have high-priority
2. four other features or functions that might be added
1. Should human rights be defined as inalienable?
   One who endorses both human rights and imprisonment as punishment for serious crimes must hold that people’s rights to freedom of movement can be forfeited temporarily or permanently by just convictions of serious crimes. Perhaps it is sufficient to say that human rights are very hard to lose
2. Should human rights be defined as minimal rights?
   A number of philosophers have proposed the view that human rights are minimal in the sense of not being too numerous, and not being too demanding.
   Their views suggest that human rights are—or should be—more concerned with avoiding the worst than with achieving the best
3. Should human rights be defined as always being or “mirroring” moral rights?
   Philosophers coming to human rights theory from moral philosophy sometimes assume that human rights must be, at bottom, moral rather than legal rights. There is no contradiction, however, in people saying that they believe in human rights, but only when they are legal rights at the national or international levels
4. Should human rights be defined in terms of serving some sort of political function?
   Instead of seeing human rights as grounded in some sort of independently existing moral reality, a theorist might see them as the norms of a highly useful political practice that humans have constructed or evolved. Such a view would see the idea of human rights as playing various political roles at the national and international levels and as serving thereby to protect urgent human and national interests. These political roles might include providing standards for international evaluations of how governments treat their people and specifying when use of economic sanctions or military intervention is permissible 
2. The Existence and Grounds of Human Rights
1. How Can Human Rights Exist?
1. Legal enactment at the national and international levels
   The least controversial family of human rights is civil and political rights. These rights are familiar from historic bills of rights such as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) and the U.S. Bill of Rights (1791, with subsequent amendments). Contemporary sources include the first 21 Articles of the Universal Declaration, and treaties such as the European Convention, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the American Convention on Human Rights, and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights.
2. Attributing human rights to God’s commands
    If people do not believe in God, or in the sort of god that prescribes rights, and if you want to base human rights on theological beliefs you must persuade these people of a rights-supporting theological view. This is likely to be even harder than persuading them of human rights
3. human rights are norms found in all human moralities
   Although worldwide acceptance of human rights has been increasing rapidly in recent decades , worldwide moral unanimity about human rights does not exist. Human rights declarations and treaties are intended to change existing norms, not just describe the existing moral consensus.
2. Normative Justifications for Human Rights
1. human agency and autonomy
1. Alan Gewirth
   Alan Gewirth offered an agency-based justification for human rights. He argued that denying the value of successful agency and action is not an option for a human being; having a life requires regarding the indispensable conditions of agency and action as necessary goods. Abstractly described, these conditions of successful agency are freedom and well-being. A prudent rational agent who must have freedom and well-being will assert a “prudential right claim” to them. Having demanded that others respect her freedom and well-being, consistency requires her to recognize and respect the freedom and well-being of other persons. Since all other agents are in exactly the same position as she is of needing freedom and well-being, consistency requires her to recognize and respect their claims to freedom and well-being. She “logically must accept” that other people as agents have equal rights to freedom and well-being. These two abstract rights work alone and together to generate equal specific human rights of familiar sorts
2. Griffin
   Griffin strongly sides with those who see human rights as fundamentally moral rights. Their defining role, in Griffin’s view, is protecting people’s ability to form and pursue conceptions of a worthwhile life—a capacity that Griffin variously refers to as “autonomy,” “normative agency,” and “personhood.” This ability to form, revise, and pursue conceptions of a worthwhile life is taken to be of paramount value, the exclusive source of human dignity, and thereby the basis of human rights (Griffin 2008). Griffin holds that people value this capacity “especially highly, often more highly than even their happiness.”
   Griffin’s thesis that all human rights are grounded in normative agency is put forward not so much as a description but as a proposal, as the best way of giving human rights unity, coherence, and limits
3. Political Conceptions of Human Rights
1. John Rawls
1.  the justificatory process for human rights
   These representatives are imagined to see the countries they represent as free (rightfully independent) and equal (equally worthy of respect and fair treatment). These representatives are also imagined to be choosing rationally in light of the fundamental interests of their country, to be reasonable in seeking to find and respect fair terms of cooperation, and impartial because they are behind a “veil of ignorance”—they lack information about the country they represent such as its size, wealth, and power. Rawls holds that under these conditions these representatives will unanimously choose principles for the global order that include some basic human rights
2. a limited list of human rights
   Rawls advocated a limited list of human rights, one that leaves out many fundamental freedoms, rights of political participation, and equality rights. He did this for two reasons. One is that he wanted a list that is plausible for all reasonable countries, not just liberal democracies. The second reason is that he viewed serious violations of human rights as triggering permissible intervention by other countries, and only the most important rights can play this role.
2. Charles Beitz
1. Human Rights
   Beitz suggests that we can develop an understanding of human rights by attending to “the practical inferences that would be drawn by competent participants in the practice from what they regard as valid claims of human rights.” Observations of what competent participants say and do inform the account of what human rights are. The focus is not on what human rights are at some deep philosophical level; it is rather on how they work by guiding actions within a recently emerged and still evolving discursive practice. The norms of the practice guide the interpretation and application of human rights, the appropriateness of criticism in terms of human rights, adjudication in human rights courts, and—perhaps most importantly—responding to serious violations of human rights
2. accept Human Rights
   Beitz emphasizes the practical good that human rights do, not their grounds in some underlying moral reality. This helps make human rights attractive to people from around the world with their diverse religious and philosophical traditions. The broad justification for human rights and their normativity that Beitz offers is that they protect “urgent individual interests against predictable dangers (”standard threats“) to which they are vulnerable under typical circumstances of life in a modern world order composed of independent states.”
3. Which Rights are Human Rights?
1. Civil and Political Rights
   In deciding which specific rights are human rights it is possible to make either too little or too much of international documents such as the Universal Declaration and the European Convention. One makes too little of them by proceeding as if drawing up a list of important rights were a new question, never before addressed, and as if there were no practical wisdom to be found in the choices of rights that went into the historic documents. And one makes too much of them by presuming that those documents tell us everything we need to know about human rights. This approach involves a kind of fundamentalism: it holds that when a right is on the official lists of human rights that settles its status as a human right (“If it’s in the book that’s all I need to know.”) But the process of identifying human rights in the United Nations and elsewhere was a political process with plenty of imperfections. There is little reason to take international diplomats as the most authoritative guides to which human rights there are
2. Social Rights
1. Why did the Social Covenant opt for progressive implementation and thereby treat its rights as being somewhat like goals?
   The main reason is that many of the world’s countries lacked the economic, institutional, and human resources to realize these standards fully or even largely. For many countries, noncompliance due to inability would have been certain if these standards had been treated as immediately binding.
2. Do social rights yield a sufficient commitment to equality?
   A strongly egalitarian political program is best pursued partially within but mostly beyond the human rights framework. One reason for this is that the human rights movement will have better future prospects for acceptance and realization if it has widespread political support. That requires that the rights it endorses appeal to people with a variety of political views ranging from center-left to center-right
3. Do social rights protect sufficiently important human interests? 
   Consider two examples: the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to free public education. These rights require governments to try to remedy widespread and serious evils such as severe poverty, starvation and malnutrition, and ignorance. The importance of food and other basic material conditions of life is easy to show. These goods are essential to people’s ability to live, function, and flourish. Without adequate access to these goods, interests in life, health, and liberty are endangered and serious illness and death are probable. Lack of access to educational opportunities typically limits (both absolutely and comparatively) people’s abilities to participate fully and effectively in the political and economic life of their country.
4. Are social rights too burdensome?
   Countries that do not accept and implement social rights still have to bear somehow the costs of providing for the needy since these countries—particularly if they recognize democratic rights of political participation—are unlikely to find it tolerable to allow sizeable parts of the population to starve and be homeless. If government does not supply food, clothing, and shelter to those unable to provide for themselves, then families, friends, and communities will have to shoulder this burden
5. Are social rights feasible worldwide?
   Standards that outrun the abilities of many of their addressees are good candidates for treatment as goals. Viewing them as largely aspirational rather than as imposing immediate duties avoids problems of inability-based noncompliance. One may worry, however, that this is too much of a demotion for social rights because goals seem much weaker than rights. But goals can be formulated in ways that make them more like rights. They can be assigned addressees (the parties who are to pursue the goal), beneficiaries, scopes that define the objective to be pursued, and a high level of priority
3. Rights of Women, Minorities, and Groups
1. Women
    Violations of women’s human rights often occur in the home at the hands of other family members, not in the street at the hands of the police. Most violence against women occurs in the “private” sphere. This has meant that governments cannot be seen as the only addressees of human rights and that the right to privacy of home and family needs qualifications to allow police to protect women within the home.
2. Minority
   Minority groups are often targets of violence. Human rights norms call upon governments to refrain from such violence and to provide protections against it. This work is partly done by the right to life, which is a standard individual right. It is also done by the right against genocide which protects some groups from attempts to destroy or decimate them
3. the right against genocide be a human right
   This can be made more palatable, perhaps, by recognizing that the beneficiaries of the right against genocide are individual humans who enjoy greater security against attempts to destroy the group to which they belong
4. Environmental Rights
   Consider environmental rights, which are often defined to include rights of animals or even of nature itself. Conceived in this broad way environmental rights don’t have a good fit with the general idea of human rights because the rightholders are not humans or human groups.
   A justification for a human right to a safe environment should show that environmental problems pose serious threats to fundamental human interests, values, or norms; that governments may appropriately be burdened with the responsibility of protecting people against these threats; and that most governments actually have the ability to do this.
1. Steve Vanderheiden
   advocated by Steve Vanderheiden accepts the idea of a human right to an environment that is adequate for human life and health and derives from this broad right a more specific right to a stable climate
2. Simon Caney
   does not require introducing a new environmental right. It suggests instead that serious action to reduce and mitigate climate change is required by already well-established human rights because severe climate change will violate many people’s rights to life, food, and health
4. Universal Human Rights in a World of Diverse Beliefs and Practices