Philosophy of Human Rights

What it asks

Human rights are claimed to belong to everyone simply in virtue of being human - not granted by any state, not forfeited by any conduct, not dependent on any culture's agreement.

That is a very strong claim and it needs a ground. Four have been offered: a natural moral order, human dignity, the interests important enough to impose duties on others, and the capacity to form and pursue a conception of one's own life.

Each does some of the work. None has convinced those who hold the others, and the practice has advanced enormously while the question stayed open - which is itself something the field has to explain.

The recurring problems

Grounding. Bentham called natural rights nonsense upon stilts, and the objection has never been fully met: rights without a lawgiver need an account of what makes them real. Every proposed ground either does too little or proves too much.

Universality. If rights hold everywhere, then a society rejecting them is wrong rather than different, and the charge that this exports one tradition's values has real historical force. The reply, that the objection is usually made by governments rather than by the people whose rights are at issue, has force too.

Inflation. Every addition to the list weakens the claim that these are minimal, urgent and non-negotiable. Where the line falls between a right and an important goal is not settled.

Who owes what. A right against torture identifies a duty-bearer easily. A right to housing or health does not, particularly where no institution has the capacity, and a right nobody can be required to satisfy is hard to distinguish from an aspiration.

How it developed

The natural rights tradition runs from the Stoics through the scholastics to Locke, who argued that people have rights to life, liberty and property prior to any government, and that this limits what government may do.

The nineteenth century was largely hostile. Bentham attacked the idea as fiction, Burke on the grounds that real rights are inherited from particular traditions rather than deduced, and Marx as a screen for property interests.

The Universal Declaration in 1948 changed everything, and it was drafted deliberately without agreement on foundations - the drafters found they could agree on the rights while disagreeing entirely about why. That is either the field's central embarrassment or its most important discovery.

Philosophy caught up late. Two approaches now dominate: the orthodox one, which grounds rights in features of persons and treats the practice as answering to that, and the political one, which starts from what human rights DO in international practice - set limits on sovereignty - and works backwards to what could justify that role.

The positions within it

Natural rights theories; dignity-based accounts; interest theories and will theories of rights generally; the capability approach; political conceptions; sceptical positions from several directions. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

The political conception has grown because it explains the practice we actually have, and it is charged with abandoning the universality that gave human rights their force.

The urgent applied questions are about rights that cross generations and borders - climate, migration, and the position of people no state is answerable for - which is exactly where the who-owes-what problem bites hardest.