What Human Rights Mean
Author(s): Charles Beitz
Source: Daedalus, Vol. 132, No. 1, On International Justice (Winter, 2003), pp. 36-46
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Charles Beitz
What human ?ghts mean
JLhe Universal Declaration of Human
Rights is the founding document of
modern human rights doctrine. Adopted
by the United Nations General Assembly
in 1948, itwas
composed by
an interna
tional committee of experts representing
a great range of ethical traditions
- even
today
we would regard the original Hu
man
Rights Commission as
remarkably
multicultural. At the same time, drafting
the Declaration seems to have been a
considerably
more coll?gial enterprise
than many international negotiations.
Although members never lost sight of
the political dimensions of their assign
ment, they made an extraordinary effort
to understand each other and to identify
common
ground.
So it is a fact of particular importance
that, early in their work, the Declara
tion's framers found that itwas much
easier to agree on the content of a decla
ration of human rights than about a
common set of underlying principles. It
was the philosophical,
not the practical,
Charles Beitz isa professor of politics at Princeton
University. His philosophical and teaching inter
estsfocus on international political theory, the the
ory of human rights, and democratic theory.The
author of "Political Theory and International
Relations" and "Political Equality: An Essay in
Democratic Theory," he also edits thejournal
"Philosophy& Public Affairs.
"
arguments that were most difficult, and
in the end the framers simply agreed to
disagree about the theoretical founda
tions of human rights.
This iswhy, unlike various earlier dec
larations of rights, the 1948 document
does not propose any justifying theory. It
does not, like the American Declaration
of Independence, hold that people
are
"endowed by their Creator" with certain
rights, or, like the French Declaration of
the Rights of Man, describe human
rights
as "natural" and "sacred." After a
prefatory reference to the "inherent dig
nity" of all human beings, the Universal
Declaration simply declares certain values
to be human rights. The framers evi
dently believed that people in various
cultures could find reasons within their
own ethical traditions to support the De
claration's practical requirements.1
From one point of view the Declara
tion's silence about theoretical founda
tions can seem to be part of its bril
liance.2 The framers were surely correct
that their philosophical differences
would never be fully resolved: without
an agreement to disagree, at best the De
36 D dalus Winter 2003
i
Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New :
Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of
Human
Rights (New York :Random House,
2001), chap. 3.
2 As Michael Ignatieff suggests inHuman
Rights
as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton, N.J. :
Princeton
University Press, 2001), 88.
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claration would have been politically
empty; at worst there would have been
no declaration at all.
From another point of view, however,
the absence of an official theory of inter
national human rights is an embarrass
ment. This is partly because there is no
public basis for settling the problems of
interpretation and implementation that
the framers bequeathed to their succes
sors. As any reader of the Declaration
will recognize, these problems
can be
serious. For one
thing, many of its provi
sions are very general and need interpre
tation in order to be applied to particular
circumstances. (What, for example, does
the right "to take part in the government
of [one's] country" [art. 21] entail?) For
another, under some conditions the
practical requirements of various provi
sions might conflict and require a deci
sion about political priorities. (Consider,
for example, the potential for conflict
between the right to "just and favorable
remuneration" for work and the need for
investment sufficient to sustain future
generations.) And, of course, there is the
need to determine what political actions
are
justified in pursuit of a
right, and
who is responsible to undertake them.
Without a
justifying theory it is unclear
how these problems might be resolved.
Buedifficuleiesofinterpretationare
only part of the problem
and
perhaps
not the major part. The lack of an official
theory invites a kind of philosophical
subversion of the political aims of the
Declaration's framers. This is evident,
for example, in a
widely read article by
Maurice Cranston, published inD dalus
nearly twenty years ago. Cranston asked
the skeptical question "Are There Any
Human Rights?"3 His reply, only semi
skeptical,
was that there are indeed some What
human rights, butmany fewer than the
^??hte
Declaration maintains :there are human mean
rights to life and basic civil liberties
(freedom of speech, press, and assem
bly), but there are no human rights to
economic goods such as material subsis
tence, health care, social security,
or the
notorious (and unjustly maligned) "peri
odic holidays with pay" (art. 24).
Cranston regarded human rights
as
"the twentieth-century
name for what
has been traditionally known as 'natural
rights.'"4 And he argued, not implausi
bly, that the idea of a natural right
as it
comes to us from the tradition sits un
comfortably with some of the rights of
the Declaration. Cranston took Lockean
rights to life and liberty to be paradig
matic. Such rights
are minimalist: they
protect people against being treated in
certain ways, but they do not, except in
extremis, entitle them to the affirmative
support of others. This perspective led
him to conclude that much of the Decla
ration was
philosophically fraudulent :it
misrepresented
as universal human
rights objects that were neither universal
nor human nor even
rights.
This kind of philosophical suspicion of
international human rights
was
typical
of a generation of Anglo-American writ
ers. It can be found, for example, in the
work of John Finnis, the influential nat
ural law theorist, who, like Cranston,
identified human rights
as a contempo
rary idiom for natural rights and argued
therefore that the realm of genuine hu
man
rights is significantly narrower than
international doctrine maintains.5 And
Michael Ignatieff
himself
an articulate
D dalus Winter 2003 37
3 Maurice Cranston, "Are There Any Human
Rights?" D dalus 112 (4) (Fall 1983): 1 -17.
Cranston stated the same
position
at greater
length inWhat AreHuman Rights ? (London :
Bodley Head, 1973).
4 Cranston, What Are Human
Rights ? 1.
5 John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 198, 210
213.
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Charles advocate of human rights
- wrote re
Qenltz cently that human rights rest upon natu
international ral rights and thus, properly understood,
justice set a iess demanding standard than the
Declaration.6
Ibelieve, however, that the tendency
to identify human rights with natural
rights represents a kind of unwitting
philosophical dogmatism. It leads to a
damaging misconception of the legiti
mate scope of international human
rights and of their potential for remedi
ating injustice. As with most dogma
tisms, the first challenge is to recognize
it for what it is. And the best way to see
this is to look first at human rights
as
they actually operate in the world today
and then consider whether the natural
rights paradigm is a
help
or a hindrance
in grasping their ethical and political sig
nificance. Once we see how the tradi
tional paradigm misrepresents the prac
tice of human rights,
we will be in a bet
ter position to appreciate the real nature
of human rights and the reasons
why
we
should care about them.
This is not simply
a question of words.
Whether it is best to think of human
rights
as natural rights
or as
something
more ambitious
for
example,
as the
rights of global justice
is
ultimately
a
question about the kind of world we
should aspire to and the range of respon
sibilities that follow for politics and for
eign policy. It is a central ethical ques
tion about the direction of world politics
in the years ahead.
Consider the way that talk about hu
man
rights actually functions in the
world today. What are human rights
as
international doctrine conceptualizes
them ?And what role do ideas of human
rights play in the world's conduct of its
political business ?
We may begin with the original Uni
versal Declaration adopted by the UN in
1948 and the two principal covenants one
on civil and political, the other on
economic, social, and cultural rights
that
came into force in 1976.
The Declaration itself is a remarkable
document whose name, regrettably, is
far better known than its contents. It
consists of thirty articles stating
a broad
array of aims that are
supposed to serve
as "a common standard of achievement
for all peoples and all nations." The cov
enants, which unlike the Declaration
have the force of law, elaborate on these
aims and seek to put them into a form
that has legal effect.
These documents set forth an ambi
tious and, in some ways, a
surprisingly
specific set of aspirations.7 Their provi
sions read far more like a list of concrete
institutional standards than of general
ized, abstract rights that might exist in a
'state of nature.' They name certain core
rights that evoke Lockean principles
for
example, rights to life, liberty, and
security of the person ;and against arbi
trary imprisonment, slavery, and torture,
as well as the more
complex right
against genocide. Beyond these, there
are also provisions associated with the
rule of law (e.g., the right to a fair trial) ;
political rights (including the right "to
take part in the government of the coun
try" and to "periodic and genuine elec
tions") ;economic rights (including free
choice of employment, "just and favour
able remuneration [sufficient for] an ex
istence worthy of human dignity," and
health care) ;and rights of communities
(self-determination). These enumerated
rights
are said to belong to everyone re
gardless of race, color, sex, language,
38 D dalus Winter 2003
6
Ignatieff,
Human Rights
as Politics and Idola
try, 88.
7 I rely in some of what follows on my article
"Human Rights
as a Common Concern," Ameri
can Political Science Review 95 (2) (June 2001) :
269-282.
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religion, birth, and social status, and
without distinction "on the basis of the
political, jurisdictional
or international
status of the country or
territory to
which a person belongs."
Taken together, these rights
are not
best interpreted
as "minimum condi
tions for any kind of life at all. "8The
rights of the Declaration and the cove
nants bear on
nearly every dimension of
a
society's basic institutional structure,
from protections against the misuse of
state power to requirements for the po
litical process, health and welfare policy,
and levels of compensation for work. In
scope and detail, international human
rights are not very much more minimal
than those proposed inmany contempo
rary theories of social justice. Ifwe con
sider the list of human rights
as a
single
package
in
the words of the 1993 Vien
na Declaration, as "indivisible and inter
dependent and interrelated"9
then
we
must understand international human
rights
as
stating,
or
trying to state, some
thing more like necessary conditions of
political legitimacy,
or even of social jus
tice.
JLn the years since the UN covenants
came into force, human rights have
played a variety of roles inworld poli
tics. The most sensational has been the
use of human rights to justify foreign
interference in a state's internal affairs.
In circumstances as different as those of
Haiti, Somalia, and Kosovo, local human
rights violations have catalyzed military
action by outside agents acting with the
authority of multinational bodies. In- What
deed, reflecting
on these and other inter-
^??te
ventions of the 1990s, Kofi Annan called mean
for the development of a
systematic doc
trine of UN-sponsored humanitarian in
tervention, noting that "the world can
not stand aside when gross and system
atic violations of human rights
are tak
ing place."10 That the secretary-general
could undertake such an initiative with
any hope of success would astonish the
framers of the 1948 Declaration (much
as a few might welcome it
in
particular,
the Indian delegate Hansa Mehta, who
argued explicitly that the UN should
have authority for human rights-based
intervention11).
But intervention in any form has been
exceptional, and in recent years the po
litical functions of human rights have
more often been considerably less dra
matic. For example, a
government's hu
man
rights record can serve as a criteri
on of eligibility for participation in bilat
eral and multilateral development pro
grams and of its access to financial ad
justment assistance. The impact on hu
man rights may also be used as a stan
dard of evaluation for the policies of in
ternational financial and trade institu
tions.
In the United States, legislation re
quires periodic reporting by the govern
ment on human rights practices in other
countries (though not in the United
States itself), and a
country's eligibility
for preferential treatment in U.S. foreign
policy
can
depend
on satisfaction of hu
man
rights standards. In various parts of
D dalus Winter 2003 39
8
Ignatieff, Human
Rights
as Politics and Idola
try, 56.
9 United Nations, "Vienna Declaration and
Programme of Action,
"
adopted by the World
Conference on Human Rights, 25 June 1993
(A/CONF. 157/23) <http ://www.unhchr.ch/
huridocda/huridoca.nsf/(Symbol)/A.CONF.i57.
23.En>.
?o Kofi Annan, "Two Concepts of Sovereign
ty," The Economist (18 September 1999).
11 M. Glen Johnson, "A
Magna Carta for Man
kind :
Writing the Universal Declaration of Hu
man
Rights,"
in The Universal Declaration of
Hu
man
Rights
:A History of
its Creation and
Imple
mentation, ed. M. Glen Johnson and Janusz
Symonides (Paris: UNESCO, 1998), 32.
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Charles the world
- most notably in Europe
- re
fl
z
gional codes of human rights have beenon & o
international adopted (though they
are not always
as
justice expansive as the UN documents) and
there is a
developing international ca
pacity for adjudication and something
like enforcement.
Beyond the multiple roles of human
rights in international organizations and
national foreign policies, human rights
also have important functions as foci of
political activity, both within and out
side the policy process, for a
large and
growing number of nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs)
the
components
of a "curious grapevine," in Eleanor
Roosevelt's evocative phrase.12 These
functions include education and advoca
cy, standard-setting, monitoring, and,
sometimes, enforcement.
The human rights NGOs are often de
scribed as the core of a
global civil socie
ty. That might be misleading
these
or
ganizations, after all, frequently speak
with a
developed-country accent, and
many lack effective internal mechanisms
of accountability. Still, the human rights
NGOs have done important work in pop
ularizing the idea of human rights and in
drawing international attention to egre
gious violations. They have encouraged
the growth of a
global human rights cul
ture that cuts across national political
boundaries while changing the structure
of incentives that those who make deci
sions about national foreign policy must
negotiate.
Jtolitical scientists sometimes say there
is a
global 'human rights regime/ (A 're
gime,' in the jargon of the discipline, is a
set of "explicit
or
implicit principles,
norms, rules and decision-making pro
cedures around which actors' expecta
tions converge in a
given
area of interna
tional relations."13) Itwould be hard to
deny that this is true, but the term does
not fully embrace the reality of interna
tional human rights practice. For one
thing, by focusing
on norms and deci
sion procedures, the idea of a
regime de
flects attention from the fact that human
rights operate as normative standards in
various informal political
arenas ;con
sider, for example, the annual human
rights compliance reports of the Depart
ment of State, whose political signifi
cance is at best tangential to their role in
the official processes of foreign policy.
Moreover, the idea of a human rights
regime does not properly describe the
growing activity and achievements of
NGOs. The transnational culture
spawned by these organizations is at
least as
important for its diffuse effects
on attitudes and beliefs as for its capaci
ty to influence formal processes of poli
cy-making.
Finally, the idea of a
regime does not
reflect the emergent and aspirational
character of human rights. Unlike, say,
the financial or trade regimes, human
rights politics doesn't aim only to insti
tutionalize and regulate existing interac
tions ;it seeks to propagate ideals and
motivate political change. Human rights
stand for a certain ambition about how
the world might be. To whatever extent
contemporary international political life
can be said to have what, in the domestic
analog, John Rawls calls a "sense of jus
tice," its language is the language of hu
man
rights.14
40 D dalus Winter 2003
12 Quoted inWilliam Korey,
NGOs and the Uni
versal Declaration of
Human
Rights
: "A Curious
Grapevine"(New York: St. Martin's Press,
1998), ix.
13 Stephen
D. Krasner, ed., International Re
gimes (Ithaca, N.Y. :Cornell University Press,
1983), 2. John Gerard Ruggie argues that there
is a
global human rights regime in "Human
Rights and the Future International Commu
nity,"
D dalus 112 (4) (Fall 1983) : 103 -104.
14 For Rawls, the "sense of justice"
is a
princi
pled conception of social justice broadly shared
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JLxuman rights
as we find them in inter
national practice don't fit the mold of
natural rights in at least three important
ways :natural rights
are
supposed to be
pre-institutional; they
are
supposed to
belong to people 'naturally'
that
is,
solely in virtue of their common human
ity ;they
are
supposed to be timeless. But
international human rights don't meet
any of these standards. The question is
what we should make of this. Is there
something wrong with human rights ?
Natural rights theorists imagined that
political society developed by
means of a
social contract from a
pre-political 'state
of nature' where people had certain
rights that nobody was entitled to vio
late. These rights, in Robert Nozick's
phrase,
were "side constraints."15 Natur
al rights express protections upon which
people
are entitled to insist regardless of
their institutional memberships. The
idea of a state of nature models this fact :
it imagines that individuals establish in
stitutions in a
pre-institutional situation
that is already constrained by certain
moral prohibitions; because people have
no
authority to abrogate these prohibi
tions, any institutions they establish
must respect them.
If natural rights are
pre-institutional,
then itmust make sense to think that
they could exist in a condition where
there are no institutions. It is not diffi
cult to conceive of Lockean rights to life,
liberty, and property in this way. On the
other hand, many of the rights
enumer
ated in the human rights documents
can't be so conceived. Think, for exam- What
pie, of rights to an impartial trial, to take
r^^n
part in the government of the country, mean
and to free elementary education. Be
cause these rights describe features of an
acceptable institutional environment, we
can't give meaning to the thought that
these rights might exist in a state of na
ture.What force could they possibly
have in aworld where there are no insti
tutions?
But why should human rights be con
ceived as
pre-institutional? Natural
rights theories, at least in the more liber
al variants such as Locke's, were
prima
rily attempts to formulate constraints on
the use of a
government's monopoly of
coercive power. They
were theoretical
devices by which legitimate and illegiti
mate uses of power could be distin
guished, and they make sense only
against
a
background assumption that a
central problem of political life is the
protection of individual liberties against
a
predictable threat of tyranny or op
pression. This is not the nature of the
human rights of the Declaration, which
describes "a common standard of
achievement for all peoples and all na
tions." If natural rights
are about guar
anteeing individual liberty against in
fringement by the state, human rights
are about this and more :to put it extrava
gantly, though I think not wrongly, inter
national human rights, taken as a
pack
age, are about establishing social condi
tions conducive to the living of dignified
human lives. These rights represent an
assumption of moral responsibility for
the public sphere that was missing in
classical natural rights theories.
What the proper bounds of that re
sponsibility are, how its burdens should
be distributed, and, for that matter,
whether we should believe that any such
responsibility lodges in the public sphere
all
are reasonable questions. Idon't
D dalus Winter 2003 41
within a
society that defines a
political ideal
and serves as a basis for criticism of the status
quo. John Rawls, A
Theory of Justice, rev. ed.
(Cambridge, Mass. :Harvard University Press,
1999), 4L
15 Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
(Cambridge, Mass. :Harvard University Press,
1974), 30-33.
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mean to foreclose them. The point is
that none of these questions can be re
solved, so to speak, by conceptual fiat.
They
are substantial questions of politi
cal morality and deserve to be answered
on their merits.
xhe Universal Declaration holds that
all human beings
are "born free and
equal in dignity and rights" (art. 1) and
that "everyone is entitled to all the
rights" subsequently enumerated (art.
2). These passages say that everyone has
human rights. This is one sense inwhich
rights
can be 'universal.'
But the idea that human rights are like
natural rights in belonging to people in
virtue of their common humanity in
volves a further thesis bearing
on the
justification of human rights. It holds that
human rights, if they
are to be really uni
versal, must be grounded
on characteris
tics that all human beings possess, and
therefore their justification must not
depend
on
merely contingent social rela
tionships.
Philosophers have given the idea of
"belonging to people in virtue of their
common humanity"
a specific and, as it
turns out, a very restrictive interpreta
tion. It derives from H. L. A. Hart's im
portant article "Are There Any Natural
Rights?" first published in 1955 and
widely read more
recently because of its
influence on the political philosophy of
John Rawls.16 (Interestingly, the phrase
'human rights' does not appear inHart's
article at all.)
Hart distinguishes between "general
rights" and "special rights"
:
special
rights arise out of "special transactions
[or] special relationships," such as
promises and contracts or membership
in political society, whereas general
Charles
Beitz
on
international
justice
rights belong to "all men
capable of
choice... in the absence of those special
conditions which give rise to special
rights."17 Hart identifies only
one gener
al right
"the
equal right of all men to
be free." He does not claim that there are
no other general rights, but he mentions
none, and he describes every other right
either as deriving from this one general
right
or as a
special right.
Now if all rights must fall into one of
these two categories, then natural rights
must be general. As Hart says, this is
because natural rights belong tomen
"qua men and not only if they
are mem
bers of some society
or stand in some
special relation to each other."18 Many
theorists have thought that human
rights must be general rights for the
same reason.19
But ifwe assume that human rights
must be general rights
as Hart under
stood them, then we must conclude that
there are very few genuine human
rights. Consider, for example, the right
to an
adequate standard of living. Any
plausible explanation of the moral basis
of this right will have to refer to certain
features of people's social relations. This
may not be immediately obvious ;rights
talk tends to focus on the beneficiaries of
rights,
so itmight
seem that we can ex
plain the moral importance of an ade
quate standard of living without having
to refer to anything other than facts
about the beneficiary's 'humanity'
-
for
example, her physical needs. However,
this is only half the story
and
the easier
half at that. A complete explanation of
the right would also have to say where
42 D dalus Winter 2003
i6 H. L. A. Hart, "Are There Any Natural
Rights?" Philosophical Review 64 (2) (1955):
175 -191.
17 Ibid., 183,188 ;on
political society
as a coop
erative scheme, see 185.
18 Ibid., 175.
19 For example, Peter Jones, Rights (New York :
St. Martin's Press, 1994), 81.
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the resources should come from to satis
fy the right and why anyone has a
duty
to provide them. Answers to these ques
tions inevitably force us to consider peo
ple's social relations. That iswhy, in the
domestic case, similar questions have
their natural home in a discourse about
social justice.
Well, sowhat? One might say, as one
philosopher has recently written, that
"
[t]he correct conclusion is that many of
the rights affirmed in the Universal Decla
ration are
really not human rights at
all...."20
But this is another case of conceptual
fiat. Why must we insist that human
rights be justified by considerations of
common
humanity
as such? The mis
take, I think, is to infer from the fact that
human rights
are
supposed to be claim
able by everyone, that they must be gen
eral rights inHart's sense. Human rights
might, instead, be conceived as a catego
ry of special rights
roughly
speaking,
as
rights that arise out of people's relation
ships as participants in a
global political
economy. Philosophers of global justice
disagree about how these relationships
should be understood, and particularly,
whether it is right to regard them as co
incident with membership in domestic
society. The latter question isworth
thinking about: Why, for example,
should we think that social justice
re
quires U.S. citizens to do more for the
steel worker inWest Virginia than for
the factory worker in aMexican maqui
ladora? The question resists facile an
swers.
For the moment, fortunately,
we can
be agnostic ;for, short of denying that
there is such a
thing
as one's role as a
participant in the global economy, any
plausible view about global justice will
generate some conception of the sort of
'special right' I refer to here. And this is
all we need to refute the idea that human
rights must be limited to those rights we
can understand as
belonging to people
solely in virtue of their common human
ity.
V V hen we say that human rights
are
universal, we
might mean that all hu
man
beings at all times and places would
be justified in claiming them. Natural
rights
were
supposed to have this kind of
timelessness, and this might encourage
someone to believe that human rights
should too.
But of course few of the human rights
listed in the Universal Declaration
would pass the test. The framers of the
Declaration could not have intended
that the doctrine of human rights apply,
for example, to the ancient Greeks or to
China in the Ch'in Dynasty
or to Euro
pean societies in the Middle Ages. Inter
national human rights, to judge by the
contents of the Declaration and cove
nants, are suited to
play
a role in a cer
tain range of societies. Roughly speak
ing, these are societies that have at least
some of the defining features of modern
ization :a
reasonably well-developed
legal system (including a capability for
enforcement), an economy with some
significant portion of employment in
industry rather than agriculture, and a
public institutional capacity to raise rev
enue and provide essential collective
goods. It is hard to imagine any interest
ing sense inwhich a doctrine of human
rights pertaining principally
to societies
meeting these conditions could be said
to be'timeless.'
D dalus Winter 2003
20 Carl Wellman, "Social Justice and Human
Rights," inAn Approach toRights (Dordrecht :
Kluwer, 1997), 197. Similarly, Cranston: "An
other test of a human right
is that itmust be a
universal right,
one that pertains to every hu
man
being
as such
and
economic and social
rights clearly do not." Cranston, "Are There
Any Human
Rights
?" 13.
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Charles One philosopher therefore adopts
a
Qenl
z
more cautious formulation :he says that
international human rights should "have weight and
justice bearing for future human beings in soci
eties not yet existing... ."21But this
doesn't seem
right, either. International
human rights
are not evenprospectively
timeless. They are standards appropriate
to the institutions of modern or modern
izing societies coexisting in a
global po
litical economy inwhich human beings
face a series of predictable threats. As
Jack Donnelly observes, the composition
of the list of human rights is explained
by the nature of these threats.22 As the
economic and technological environ
ment evolves, the array of threats will
change, and so, over time, will the list of
human rights. The lack of timelessness is
a
problem only ifwe insist that human
rights should be something they
were
plainly not meant to be.
JLhemind seeks simplifying models, so
perhaps
we should not be surprised that
in the absence of a better alternative,
philosophers would persist in thinking
of human rights
as natural rights. The
paradigm is coherent and familiar and
makes the most of the historical conti
nuity of the human rights movement
with earlier efforts to advance the 'rights
of man.' As we have seen, however, ac
cepting the paradigm has its price
:it di
minishes and distorts the aspirations of
international human rights doctrine. So
it isworth considering how else we
might conceive of human rights and
whether as amatter of political theory
a
different conception would be more
plausible.
Here is a
proposal. Suppose
we
begin
with two of the ideas central to contem
porary international human rights doc
trine.
First, human rights
are
closely
con
nected to human dignity: they state con
ditions that domestic social institutions
should satisfy in order to respect, in the
words of the 1993 Vienna Declaration,
"the dignity and worth inherent in the
human
person."
Second, human rights
are a
global
con
cern :their systematic violation in a soci
ety over a
period of time could justify
some appropriate form of remedial ac
tion by agents outside of the society
where the violation occurs.
Putting these two ideas together,
we
might say that human rights
are the ba
sic requirements of global justice. They
describe conditions that the institutions
of all domestic societies should strive to
satisfy, whatever a
society's
more com
prehensive aims. And their violation
identifies deficiencies that, if not made
good locally, should command the atten
tion and resources of the international
community. If a country failed to satisfy
these conditions even
though itwere
equipped to fulfill them, that country
would become susceptible to outside
corrective interference. If the failure
were due to a lack of local resources, this
could justify
a requirement
on others to
assist.23
There is no
escaping that on this view
human rights represent a
partisan ideal.
And the reference to human dignity and
human worth guarantees that the ideal
will almost certainly be more
congenial
to some than to other conceptions of jus
tice or
political good.
44 D dalus Winter 2003
21 Rex Martin, A System of Rights (New York :
Oxford University Press, 1993), 74-75.
22 Jack Donnelly, Universal Human
Rights
in
Theory and Practice (Ithaca, N. Y. :Cornell Uni
versity Press, 1989), 26.
23 John Rawls proposes something like this
conception of human rights
in The Law
of
Peo
ples (Cambridge, Mass. :Harvard University
Press, 1999), sec. 10.
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On the other hand, it is a
capacious
ideal, and at this level of generality it is
consistent with the aspirations of all the
world's main moral cultures. If evidence
is needed, one might simply look to the
virtually unanimous endorsement of in
ternational human rights
norms in a suc
cession of increasingly inclusive interna
tional fora.
The qualification about level of gener
ality is important. When we consider
practices such as capital punishment in
the United States or female genital muti
lation in Sahelian Africa, we are remind
ed that there can be serious intercultural
disagreement about what is necessary to
respect human dignity and human
worth. But one should not be misled by
these examples. For one
thing, neither of
these cases
really involves a confronta
tion between a
morally monolithic local
culture and the international culture of
human rights ;in both cases there are
significant divisions within the local cul
ture that conflict with majority interpre
tations of human rights. But even if this
were not true, these examples are much
more the exception than the rule. Any
one who reads the major international
human rights instruments with reason
able charity would see that most of the
values found there fit comfortably with
in awide range of cultural moral tradi
tions. When human rights
are contro
versial in political practice, it is not usu
ally because they
are
culturally partisan,
but rather because people disagree about
their relative priority
over other values,
or about the nature and extent of the
international right and responsibility to
remediate.
It is this last point that is likely to evoke
the greatest concern. If human rights
are
requirements of global justice, and if vi
olations could trigger
an international
duty to act, then human rights might
threaten to engulf many other values we What
care about. International human rights rj"??
imperatives could undermine the integ- mean
rity of local communities by encourag
ing indiscriminate, well-meaning inter
vention; they could command resource
transfers from societies with their own
internal problems ;they could play into
regional conflicts and exacerbate exist
ing instabilities. The old view of human
rights, however misleading itmight have
been in theory, at least had the political
virtues of minimalism. Does the para
digm of global justice demand too
much?
Part of the answer
depends
on the con
tent of the idea of global justice, and part
depends
on the nature of the remedial
rights and responsibilities that flow
from human rights violations. The first
question is interesting and points to a
large, unresolved set of philosophical
issues. But I think the second one is
more
important practically. Here the key
point is that the ideas of corrective inter
ference and requirement to assist could
each encompass many kinds of action.
Interference, for example, could mean
military intervention (as in Kosovo) but
could also involve nonviolent forms of
intervention (like making foreign aid
conditional on upholding human
rights). Similarly, assistance might con
sist of direct transfers (as in develop
ment aid), but itmight also entail less
direct forms of help (like reforming dis
criminatory trade practices). Indeed, hu
man
rights violations could command
international attention in a
meaningful
way even if neither corrective interfer
ence nor
tangible assistance were feasi
ble
for
example, by triggering advocacy
or cross-border political action by NGOs.
Moreover, the fact that persistent vio
lations could justify international action
does not mean they always do. As in any
aspect of political morality,
a host of
D dalus Winter 2003 45
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Charles
practical considerations bear on a deci
Qenl
z
sion whether and how to act, even when
international there is an uncontroversially meritorious
justice cause of action. The theory of the just
war presents a useful parallel
:even
when there is a
just cause, a country may
not resort towar if there is no reason
able expectation that the cause can be
won without disproportionate
use of
force or
unacceptable collateral damage.
Nor may a country resort towar if it is
unable or
unwilling to commit the re
sources necessary towin its cause -
that
would simply inflict harm without hope
of achieving
a just result. Similarly in the
case of human rights, the international
community should act only if there is a
reasonable hope of stopping egregious
violations of human rights without in
curring disproportionate costs or caus
ing unacceptable collateral harm.
JLhese reflections do not add up to a
philosophical defense of the idea that
human rights
are
requirements of global
justice ;they only aim tomake that idea
plausible as a
description of internation
al practice, and to show that the most
common worries about itmay be over
stated.
But someone who is still attached to
the traditional paradigm might say it
was amistake from the beginning to give
somuch weight to the international doc
trine of human rights and to the role of
ideas of human rights in real-world in
ternational political practice. Perhaps
international doctrine and practice are
simply wrong
perhaps
they amount to
no more than the reification of a bad
idea
and
perhaps
we would be better
off dispensing with human rights talk
altogether.
Idoubt that this will turn out to be
right, but the point to be made in con
clusion is that there is only
one way to
find out. Theory has to begin
some
where. We begin with the observation
that there is an international practice of
human rights, and we ask some distinc
tively theoretical questions
:What kinds
of things
are these human rights, why
should we believe in them, and what fol
lows ifwe do?
But whereas present practice is the be
ginning, it need not be the end; in fact, it
would be surprising if a critical theory of
human rights did not argue for revisions
in the practice
conceivably
substantial
ones. If so, however, one should expect
this to be the conclusion of an argument
that takes seriously the aspirations of the
practice as we have it. To dismiss the
practice because it doesn't conform to a
received philosophical construction
seems tome
dogmatic in the most
unconstructive way.
46 D dalus Winter 2003
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