In Defence of Traditional Theories of Human Rights

In this article I undertake a critical survey of contemporary rights-based theories of global justice by drawing out some of the common claims, challenges, features, and tensions. A familiar theme among these otherwise divergent perspectives is that global justice demands that every individual be well positioned to enjoy the prospects for a decent life. Explaining and realizing this demand is modelled upon universal respect for human rights. I develop a composite account aimed at identifying the salient features concerning their content, justification, and role. I am interested in the commonalities and mutually reinforcing aspects of the valuable members of the team of concepts central to rights-based accounts, specifically, needs, capabilities, and rights. This critical survey helps us gain a better understanding of the terrain and to highlight a rights-based capabilities perspective as central to the pursuit of global justice. This has the value of putting into clearer focus some of the battle lines and new directions in global justice and human rights.

Boston College Law Review, 2012

The two traditional ways of thinking about justice at the global level either limit the applicability of justice to states or else extend it to all human beings. The view I defend rejects both these approaches and instead recognizes different considerations or conditions based on which individuals are in the scope of different principles of justice. Finding a philosophically convincing alternative to those approaches strikes me as the most demanding and important challenge contemporary political philosophy faces (one that in turn reflects the significance of the political issues that are at stake). My own view, and thus my attempt at meeting this challenge, acknowledges the existence of multiple grounds of justice. This book seeks to present a foundational theory that makes it plausible that there could be multiple grounds of justice and to defend a specific view of the grounds that I call pluralist internationalism. Pluralist Internationalism grants particular normative relevance t...

School of Human Rights Research Newsletter vol 16(4) at 9-10, 2012

Debates on global justice are flourishing. In this review article I examine three recent contributions to this debate, which, even though they differ from each other in their overall approach and normative conclusion, exemplify what might be called the third wave of global justice theorizing. Aaron James’s Fairness in Practice, Mathias Risse’s On Global Justice, and Laura Valentini’s Justice in a Globalized World belong to the third wave of theories of global justice in virtue of a combination of features: They disentangle conceptual and normative disagreements that underpinned debates between cosmopolitans and non-cosmopolitans, or statists and globalists; drawing on their refined conceptual toolkit, they develop both substantive and methodological alternatives to familiar positions; and they take these alternatives as a vantage point for thinking about what justice would require of particular aspects of the international order, sometimes in very practical terms. My discussion of the third wave proceeds in four steps. First, I shall present the key arguments and most important ideas of each book. I introduce Valentini’s coercion framework for thinking about questions of global justice, explain how James thinks of structural equity as a requirement of fairness in international trade, and present Risse’s approach of pluralist internationalism and its focus on common ownership of the earth. Second, I shall explain how each contribution exhibits at least some of the features characteristic of the third wave. On the one hand, this section explains why in spite of their differences a common label is appropriate for James, Risse and Valentini. On the other hand, it offers an account of the virtues and strengths of each approach. Third, I present what I believe is a systematic challenge to the third wave of global justice: Each way of covering the middle ground between statism and globalism comes with a particular difficulty, giving rise to what one may call a third wave dilemma. Finally, I conclude by sketching how the third wave is likely to transform the research agenda of international political theorists. Even those developing alternatives to the third wave will have to be measured by the standards it sets.

2013

The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. A burgeoning human rights movement followed, yielding many treaties and new international institutions and shaping the constitutions and laws of many states. Yet human rights continue to be contested politically and legally and there is substantial philosophical and theoretical debate over their foundations and implications. In this volume distinguished philosophers, political scientists, international lawyers, environmentalists and anthropologists discuss some of the most difficult questions of human rights theory and practice: What do human rights require of the global economy? Does it make sense to secure them by force? What do they require in jus post bello contexts of transitional justice? Is global climate change a human rights issue? Is there a human right to democracy? Does the human rights movement constitute moral progress? For students of political philosophy, human rights, peace studies, and international relations.

2012

Current Legal Problems, 2012

Two important trends are discernible in the contemporary philosophy of human rights. According to foundationalism, human rights have importantly distinctive normative grounds as compared with other moral norms. An extreme version of foundationalism claims that human interests do not figure among the grounds of human rights; a more moderate version restricts the human interests that can ground human rights to a subset of that general class, eg basic needs or our interest in freedom. According to functionalism, it belongs to the essence of human rights that they play a certain political role or combination of such roles, eg operating as benchmarks for the legitimacy of states or triggers for intervention against states that violate them. This article presents a view of human rights that opposes both the foundationalist and the functionalist trends. Against foundationalism, it is argued that a plurality of normative values ground human rights; these values include not only the equal moral status of all human beings but also potentially all universal human interests. Against functionalism, it is argued that human rights are moral standards-moral rights possessed by all human beings simply in virtue of their humanity-that may perform a plurality of political functions, but that none of these functions is definitive of their nature as human rights. The ensuing, doubly pluralistic, account of human rights is one that, it is claimed, both makes best sense of the contemporary human rights culture and reveals the strong continuities between that culture and the natural rights tradition.

Human Rights Review, 2021