Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of basic rights. The wisdom of a U.S. foreign policy that includes attention to “human rights” depends heavily upon which rights are in practice the focus of the attention. The major international documents on human rights include dozens of kinds of rights, often artificially divided into “civil and political” and “economic, social, and cultural” rights. U.S. foreign policy probably could not, and almost certainly should not, concern itself with the performance of other governments in honoring every one of these internationally recognized human rights. The policy must in practice assign priority to some rights over others. It is not entirely clear so far either which rights are receiving priority or which rights ought to receive priority in U.S. foreign policy. The purpose of this book is to present the reasons why the most fundamental core of the so-called “economic rights,” which can be called subsistence rights, ought to be among those that receive priority. The chapter then presents some divergent indications of what the priorities actually are.

Liberty

This chapter evaluates the right conventionally most emphatically endorsed in North Atlantic theory: rights to liberties. Some liberties merit attention for many reasons, not the least of which is a strange convergence between supposed “friends” of liberty in the North Atlantic and rulers in the poorer countries who would share the emphasis on the priority of subsistence rights. Both groups have converged upon the “trade-off” thesis: subsistence can probably be enjoyed in poor countries only by means of “trade-offs” with liberties. This thesis might also be called the theory of reluctantly repressive development. The chapter shows that although the advocates of repressive development profess a strong commitment to the provision of subsistence, those theories of repressive development must be sharply distinguished from the theory of basic rights presented in this book. One of the several major differences is the place assigned here to at least some liberties, and the chapter indicates how fundamentally the same argument that establishes security rights and subsistence rights as basic rights also justifies the acknowledgement of at least certain political liberties and certain freedom of movement as equally basic. The basic liberties will turn out to include the liberty of participation.

Nationality and Responsibility

This chapter explores the argument that it cannot be anyone's responsibility to fulfill the rights of strangers on the other side of the globe, however much responsibility one may have to the deprived within one's own country. The core of this view can be called the thesis that compatriots take priority—take it at least in the case of duties to aid. The view need not completely deny that there are universal subsistence rights, but it does deny that any correlative duties to aid are universal, or even transnational. The view that compatriots take priority might accept the priority principle but restrict its application to the nation of the bearer of the duty. The chapter then surveys some of the major kinds of reasons offered for taking national boundaries so very seriously in what is fundamentally a moral issue, and indicates very briefly some reasons for doubt about each kind.

Realism and Responsibility

This chapter assesses the argument that the practical consequences of everyone's enjoying adequate nutrition—and especially the allegedly resultant global “population explosion”—would make the fulfillment of subsistence rights impracticable, however genuine the rights may be at a theoretical level. It would hurt the future poor. These population objections rest upon a thesis about inevitable deprivation: deprivation that is inevitable unless population growth is slowed by means of the international refusal to fulfill subsistence rights. If indeed the world now has, or soon will have, an absolute shortage of vital resources, then some people will simply have to do without the necessities for survival. On this thesis about the explanation of deprivation, the unavoidable deprivations resulting from the supposed excess of people are taken to be as purely natural as any social phenomenon could be, and attempting to provide social guarantees against the resultant starvation is made to look quixotic.

Affluence and Responsibility

This chapter addresses the idea that the fulfillment of subsistence rights would probably place inordinate, if not unlimited, burdens on everyone except the poorest. It would not be possible, and it is not necessary in order to fulfill subsistence rights, to transfer so much wealth and income from the currently affluent to the currently deprived that today's affluent will be reduced to a level only marginally better than subsistence. Nevertheless, since no calculation of the costs of fulfilling subsistence rights universally can be precise, one cannot rule out the possibility that those with the duties to aid the deprived will suffer some decline in the quality of their lives as a result of making the required transfers. In general, there is no reason why the performance of duties, especially duties correlative to basic rights, should cost the bearers of the duties nothing. But, as the broader population objection complains, it is possible for the costs to be unreasonably high.

Correlative Duties

This chapter examines some of the reasons why it sometimes appears that although people have basic security rights, the right, if any, to even the physical necessities of existence like minimal health care, food, clothing, shelter, unpolluted water, and unpolluted air is somehow less urgent or less basic. Frequently it is asserted or assumed that a highly significant difference between rights to physical security and rights to subsistence is that they are respectively “negative” rights and “positive” rights. The chapter offers some examples that clearly illustrate that the honoring of subsistence rights sometimes involves action no more positive than the honoring of security rights does. It also presents two theses about economic deprivation. The chapter then suggests that with every basic right, there are three types of correlative duties: duties to avoid depriving; duties to protect from deprivation; and duties to aid the deprived.

Basic Rights

Since its original publication, this book has proven increasingly influential to those working in political philosophy, human rights, global justice, and the ethics of international relations and foreign policy, particularly in debates regarding foreign policy's role in alleviating global poverty. The book asks: Which human rights ought to be the first honored and the last sacrificed? It argues that subsistence rights, along with security rights and liberty rights, serve as the ground of all other human rights. This classic work, now available in a thoroughly updated fortieth-anniversary edition, includes a substantial new chapter examining how the accelerating transformation of our climate progressively undermines the bases of subsistence like sufficient water, affordable food, and housing safe from forest-fires and sea-level rise. Climate change threatens basic rights.

From Sustainable Development Goals to Basic Development Goals

The Sustainable Development Goals have attracted both defenders and critics. Composed of seventeen goals and 169 targets, the overly broad scope of the SDGs raises the question of whether there are priorities that need to be set within them. This essay considers the SDGs from the perspective of a “basic goods approach” to development policy, which takes a needs-based and basic-subsistence-rights view on policy priorities. It focuses on a subset of SDGs that directly address the provision of nutritious food, clean water, sanitation, health services, education services, and human security services. In doing so, it proposes a set of seven “basic development goals” and ten associated targets. It argues that this more focused approach can better protect basic rights, more effectively contribute to progress on human wellbeing, and make accountability more likely.