The Feasibility of Human Rights

To be justifiable, the demands of a conception of human rights and global justice must be such that (a) they focus on the protection of extremely important human interests and (b) their fulfillment is feasible. This chapter provides a discussion of (b), the Feasibility Condition. It presents, first, a general account of the relation between moral desirability, feasibility and obligation within a conception of justice. Next, it provides an analysis of the notion of feasibility. This idea is in fact quite complex, including different types, domains, and degrees. The chapter concludes by identifying several ways in which we can respond to alleged circumstances of infeasibility regarding the fulfillment of basic socioeconomic human rights against severe poverty.

Minimalist versus Expansive Views of Human Rights: Dignity and the Arc of Humanist Justice

This chapter explores the implications of the dignitarian approach for the ongoing debate in the philosophy of human rights about how minimalist or expansive human rights should be taken to be. After a critical survey of eleven arguments for minimalist accounts of human rights, the chapter endorses a moderate form of expansivism casting human rights as basic claims that cover the most urgent requirements of human dignity. It presents a two-tiered, dynamic humanism that enables us to arbitrate the debate between minimalist and expansive views of human rights. Elements of egalitarianism (in particular regarding political rights) are part of this picture. However, a wider and more ambitious set of egalitarian demands of humanist justice that go beyond human rights (such as democratic socialism) is also seen as flowing from the dignitarian perspective, and its significance for the contemporary political context is explored.

Introduction

This chapter outlines the main conceptual and substantive contributions of this book, and provides an overview of the three parts composing it. A characterization of the concept of human rights is offered. The eight components of the dignitarian approach to human rights developed in the rest of the book are outlined. They comprise: (C1) an account of human dignity; (C2) the ideal of solidaristic empowerment; (C3) a distinction between abstract and specific human rights and a division of three dimensions of a conception of human rights; (C4) an account of feasibility; (C5) general and dignitarian schemas for justifying rights; (C6) a contractualist framework of reasoning for justifying rights; (C7) the method of deliberative reflective equilibrium; and (C8) the idea of a deliberative interpretive proposal. Finally, the practical significance of the idea of putting humanity first—which follows naturally from the dignitarian approach—is identified.

Labor Rights

Human rights discourse invokes entitlements to freely chosen work, to decent working conditions, and to form and join unions. Despite their importance, these rights remain underexplored in the philosophical literature on human rights. This chapter offers a systematic and constructive discussion of them. It surveys the content and current relevance of the labor rights stated in the most important human rights documents. It gives a moral defense of these rights, justifying their support on the basis of important human interests and human dignity. It replies to objections about the importance of work, explains why labor human rights may not exhaust the demands of dignity regarding labor, and arbitrates a common tension between independence and solidarity. To solidaristically empower all persons who can work to access and defend decent working conditions in which their valuable capacities can be developed and exercised is an obligatory response to their human dignity.

Understanding Human Dignity in Human Rights

This chapter offers an interpretation of the idea of human dignity that explains how it can play certain valuable roles in human rights discourse. The idea contributes to the articulation of a distinctive set of norms that are universalist and humanist, the justification of specific human rights, the grounding of the great normative force of these rights, the combined generation of both negative and positive duties correlative to them, the explanation of the significance of political struggles against their violation, and the illumination of the arc of humanist justice running from basic requirements mandating people’s access to a decent life to maximal requirements to support people’s access to a flourishing life. The idea of human dignity is articulated through a conceptual network that includes an organic set of more specific ideas. These ideas include status-dignity, condition-dignity, dignitarian norms, the basis of dignity, the circumstances of dignity, and dignitarian virtue.

Human Rights and Power

This chapter explores the tensions between the normative ideal of human rights and the facts of asymmetric power. First, it reconstructs and assesses important power-related worries about human rights. These worries are sometimes presented as falsifying the view that human rights exist, or at least as warranting the abandonment of human rights practice. But the worries do not warrant such conclusions. Instead, they motivate certain desiderata for the amelioration of human rights practice. The chapter identifies twelve such desiderata. Second, this chapter proposes a strategy for satisfying these desiderata. It suggests ways to build empowerment into the human rights project to reduce the absolute and relative powerlessness of human rights holders, while also identifying an ethics of responsibility and solidarity for contexts in which power deficits will not dissolve. Power analysis does not debunk the human rights project. Properly articulated, it is an important tool for those pursuing it.

Humanist and Political Perspectives on Human Rights

This chapter explores the relation between two perspectives on the nature of human rights. According to the “political” or “practical” perspective, human rights are claims that individuals have against certain institutional structures, in particular modern states, in virtue of interests they have in context that include them—and normally warrant international support. This perspective is introduced in contrast to the more traditional “humanist” or “naturalistic” one, according to which human rights are pre-institutional claims that individuals have against all other individuals that can affect them in virtue of interests characteristic of their common humanity. This chapter argues that once we identify these perspectives in their best light we can see that they are complementary and that in fact we need both to make good normative sense of the contemporary practice of human rights.

The Dignitarian Approach as a Program

This chapter outlines dignitarianism—or the dignitarian approach—as a general normative program. Dignitarianism states that at least some of the central norms concerning the treatment of individual entities depend on their inherent dignity—they require appropriate responses to it. After outlining the structure of dignitarian arguments, the chapter casts human rights as an exemplary instance of them. The chapter then addresses several philosophical issues regarding dignitarianism. It offers a broad view of human capacities and interests, an account of how dignitarianism helps bridge the justificatory gap between important interests and rights to their support, a deployment of moral contractualism as a device for defending dignitarian norms, an exploration of the relation between dignitarianism and ethical pluralism, and a presentation of dignitarian inquiry as a form of critical theory. The chapter concludes by outlining the main components and tasks of dignitarianism as a theoretical and practical program.

Political Rights

Is there a human right to democracy (HRD)? How does the achievement of human rights, including the human right to democracy, contribute to the pursuit of global justice? The chapter identifies three reasons for favoring democracy and explores their significance for defending it as a human right. It answers important worries that acknowledging an HRD would lead to intolerance and lack of respect for people’s self-determination, exaggerate the importance of democracy for securing other rights, generalize institutional arrangements that only work in some contexts, and tie human rights to specific ideas of freedom and equality that do not have the same universal appeal and urgency. Tackling the second question, the chapter argues that by providing a floor of dignity on which people can stand in the organization of their social life, democratic political empowerment is crucial for the pursuit of both basic and maximal global justice.

Dignity and Solidaristic Empowerment

This chapter argues that the requirements of human dignity can be plausibly articulated in terms of an ideal of solidaristic empowerment. The ideal asks us to support persons’ pursuit of a decent and flourishing life by affirming both negative duties not to block or destroy, and positive duties to protect and facilitate, the development and exercise of the valuable capacities that give rise to their status-dignity. Enacting appropriate respect and concern for this dignity precisely involves enhancing and using power in solidaristic ways. The key notions of power, solidarity, and capability support as explored. The resulting conceptual and normative perspective has important implications for the justification of specific human rights, such as the rights to political participation and decent work, which are more fully explored later in the book.