Human Rights Thesis: Defense by Rowan Cruft

Human Rights Thesis

• Human rights are not simply legal or social conventions, but rather are grounded in our moral and ethical obligations towards other human beings.

Two Conceptions of Human Rights

• Joseph Raz: human rights set limits to state sovereignty, requiring states to account for their compliance with human rights to international tribunals and to responsibly acting people and organizations outside.
• Kamm: individualistic account is most attractive when applied to basic rights a person has simply in virtue of being a human.

Individualistic Justification of Human Rights

• Human rights need to be genuine rights, correlating with directed duties.
• Hohfeldian Claim: any right with a certain content must correlate with a directed duty.
• Non-Hohfeldian Claim: given right must be the ground for a changing set of directed duties owed to the right holder and perhaps to others.

Rights and Duties

• Rights need not entail directed duties at all, but only undirected or non-duty considerations.
• John Tasioulas: allocation of duties and the existence of rights should be separated, and rights are prior to the directed duties they entail.
• Rights sometimes don't have a relation to duties, e.g., goals (normative phenomena).

Genuine Rights

• Genuine rights have a strict logical relation to directed duties (duties owed to someone).
• Rights must entail such duties.
• Something cannot be a right if it lacks some such relation to directed duties.

Socioeconomic Rights

• Socioeconomic rights held against improvised governments do not entail direct duty to the state, and the content of which differs from the human right in question.
• Socioeconomic rights held against improvised governments entail undirected duties borne by the relevant government.
• Certain socioeconomic human rights held against impoverished governments entail no duties whatsoever for the relevant governments, but at best non-right normative factors such as strong reasons to adopt certain policy goals.

Importance of Individualistic Justification

• Ensures that each person is recognized as an equal member of society, regardless of their identity.
• Allows a robust defense of human rights against on group consideration.
• Allows for the possibility of international human rights standards that apply universally, across all cultures and societies.

Problems of Individualistic Justification

• Two conceptions of human rights as individually justified: genuine human rights and not genuine human rights/importance values.
• Examples of genuine human rights: right not to be tortured, right to life, freedom of expression.
• Examples of not genuine human rights/importance values: socioeconomic rights (holidays, food, healthcare, and education).