What is a human right? How can we tell whether a proposed human right really is one? How do we establish the content of particular human rights, and how do we resolve conflicts between them? These are pressing questions for philosophers, political theorists, jurisprudents, international lawyers, and activists. This book offers answers in its investigation of human rights. The term ‘natural right’, in its modern sense of an entitlement that a person has, first appeared in the late Middle Ages. When during the 17th and 18th centuries the theological content of the idea was abandoned in stages, nothing was put in its place. The secularized notion that we were left with at the end of the Enlightenment is still our notion today: a right that we have simply in virtue of being human. During the 20th century, international law has contributed to settling the question of which rights are human rights, but its contribution has its limits. The notion of a human right that we have inherited suffers from no small indeterminateness of sense. The term has been left with so few criteria for determining when it is used correctly that we often have a plainly inadequate grasp on what is at issue. This book takes on the task of showing the way towards a determinate concept of human rights, based on their relation to the human status that we all share. The book works from certain paradigm cases, such as freedom of expression and freedom of worship, to more disputed cases such as welfare right — for instance the idea of a human right to health. The goal is a substantive account of human rights; an account with enough content to tell us whether proposed rights really are rights. The book emphasizes the practical as well as theoretical urgency of this goal: as the United Nations recognized in 1948 with its Universal Declaration, the idea of human rights has considerable power to improve the lot of humanity around the world.
Author(s): James Griffin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 354
City: Oxford; New York
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction
Part I An Account of Human Rights
1 Human Rights: The Incomplete Idea
1.1 The Enlightenment Project on Human Rights
1.2 The Indeterminateness of the term ‘Human Right’
1.3 Remedies for the Indeterminateness
1.4 Different Approaches to Explaining Rights: Substantive and Structural Accounts
1.5 A Different Kind of Substantive Account
1.6 How should we go About Completing the Idea?
Expand
2 First Steps in an Account of Human Rights
2.1 Top‐down and bottom‐up accounts
2.2 The human rights tradition
2.3 A proposal of a substantive account
2.4 One Ground for Human Rights: Personhood
2.5 A Second Ground: Practicalities
2.6 Is there a Third Ground?: Equality
2.7 How We Should Understand ‘agency’?
2.8 In What Sense are Human Rights ‘Universal’?
2.9 Do We Need a More Pluralist Account?
3 When Human Rights Conflict
3.1 One of the central questions of ethics
3.2 Conflicts between Human Rights themselves
3.3 Are Human Rights co‐possible?
3.4 Conflicts between a Human Right and Other Kinds of Moral Consideration
3.5 A Proposal and A Qualification
3.6 A Step Beyond Intuition
3.7 Some Ways in which Human Rights Resist Trade‐offs
3.8 Reprise
4 Whose Rights?
4.1 The Scope of the Question
4.2 Potential Agents
4.3 The Inference from Moral Weight to Human Rights
4.4 Need Accounts of Human Rights
4.5 A Class of Rights on their Own?
4.6 A Role for Stipulation
4.7 Coming into Rights in Stages
Expand
5 My Rights: But Whose Duties?
5.1 Introduction
5.2 What Duties?
5.3 Whose Duties?
5.4 Primary and Secondary Duties
5.5 AIDS in Africa
5.6 Can there be Rights without Identifiable Duty‐Bearers?
6 The Metaphysics of Human Rights
6.1 Two Models of Value Judgement
6.2 Human Interests and the Natural World
6.3 The Test of the Best Explanation
6.4 The Metaphysics of Human Rights
7 The Relativity and Ethnocentricity of Human Rights
7.1 Ethical Relativity
7.2 The Relativity of Human Rights
7.3 What is the Problem of Ethnocentricity?
7.4 Tolerance
Part II Highest‐Level Human Rights
8 Autonomy
8.1 The Three Highest‐Level Human Rights
8.2 The Distinction Between Autonomy and Liberty
8.3 The Value of Autonomy
8.4 The Content of the Right to Autonomy
8.5 Autonomy and Free Will: What if We are Not Autonomous?
9 Liberty
9.1 Highest‐Level Rights
9.2 Broad and Narrow Interpretations of Liberty
9.3 ‘Pursuit’
9.4 Negative and Positive Sides of Liberty
9.5 How Demanding is the Right?
9.6 Mill's ‘one Very Simple Principle’ of Liberty
9.7 Generalizing the Results
Expand
10 Welfare
10.1 The Historical Growth of Rights
10.2 Welfare: a Civil, not a Human, Right?
10.3 A case for a Human Right to Welfare
10.4 Is the Proposed Right too Demanding?
10.5 The Undeserving Poor
10.6 Human Rights, Legal Rights, and Rights in the United Nations
Part III Applications
11 Human Rights: Discrepancies Between Philosophy and International Law
11.1 Applications of the Personhood Account
11.2 Bringing Philosophical Theory and Legal Practice Together
11.3 The list of Human Rights that Emerges from the Personhood Account
11.4 Current Legal Lists: Civil and Political Rights
(a) Unacceptable Cases.
(b) Debatable Cases.
(c) Acceptable Cases.
11.5 Interlude on the Aims and Status of International Law
11.6 Current Legal Lists: Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights
(a) Unacceptable Cases.
(b) Debatable Cases.
11.7 The Future of International Lists of Human Rights
12 A Right to Life, a Right to Death
12.1 The Scope of the Right to Life
12.2 Locke on the Scope of the Right
12.3 Personhood as the Ground of the Right
12.4 From a Right to Life to a Right to Death
12.5 Is there a Right to Death?
12.6 Is it a Positive or a Negative Right?
13 Privacy
13.1 Personhood and the Content of a Human Right to Privacy
13.2 Legal Approaches to the Right to Privacy
13.3 How Broad is the Right? : (i) Privacy of Information, (ii) Privacy of Space and Life, and (iii) the Privacy of Liberty
13.4 A Proposal About the Right to Privacy
13.5 Privacy Versus Freedom of Expression and the Right to Information
14 Do Human Rights Require Democracy?
14.1 Two Plausible Lines of Thought
14.2 Autonomy and Liberty
14.3 Democracy
14.4 Do Human Rights Require Democracy?
14.5 In Modern Conditions?
15 Group Rights
15.1 Three Generations of Rights
15.2 No Quick Way of Dismissing Group Rights
15.3 A Case for Group Rights: The Good‐Based Argument
15.4 Another Case for Group Rights: The Justice‐Based Argument
15.5 Exclusion
15.6 Reduction
15.7 What is Left?
Notes
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
Index
