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Human Rights Law Without Natural Moral Rights
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 June 2015
Extract
In this latest work by one of our leading political and legal philosophers, Allen Buchanan outlines a novel framework for assessing the system of international human rights law—the system that he takes to be the heart of modern human rights practice. Buchanan does not offer a full justification for the current system, but rather aims “to make a strong prima facie case that the existing system as a whole has what it takes to warrant our support of it on moral grounds, even if some aspects of it are defective and should be the object of serious efforts at improvement” (p. 173).
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- Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2015
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NOTES
1 The point about vaccination programs draws on the similar argument in Sreenivasan, Gopal, “A Human Right to Health? Some Inconclusive Scepticism,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 86, no. 1 (2012), pp. 239–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Buchanan notes on p. 178 (no. 5) that this idea was first introduced in his article (coauthored with Keohane, Robert), “The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions,” Ethics & International Affairs 20, no. 4 (2006), pp. 405–37Google Scholar.
3 It is notable that this wellbeing–based approach seems to be the argument that Buchanan makes for extending equal status rights to beings who lack the capacity to recognize and respond to reason (pp. 138–39). If it works for such beings, why not allow that it works for everyone?
4 Luban, David, “Human Rights Foundationalism and Human Rights Pragmatism,” in Cruft, Rowan, Liao, S. Matthew, and Renzo, Massimo, eds., Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2015)Google Scholar.
5 See the discussion of rights grounded by what they do for people other than the right-holder in Raz, Joseph, “Rights and Individual Well-Being,” in his Ethics in the Public Domain (Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and see May, Simon Căbulea, “Moral Status and the Direction of Duties,” Ethics 123, no. 1 (2012)Google Scholar, and my “Why is it Disrespectful to Violate Rights?,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 113, no. 2 (2013), pp. 201–24Google Scholar.
6 One promising attempt to take up this challenge, which came to my attention too late to be addressed in this review, is Tasioulas, John and Vayena, Effy, “Just Global Health: Integrating Human Rights and Common Goods,” in Brooks, Thom, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Global Justice (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2015)Google Scholar.
7 This is perhaps one way to read Marx's concern that “none of the so-called rights of man goes beyond egoistic man.” See Marx, Karl, “On the Jewish Question,” reprinted in McLellan, David, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 46–70 Google Scholar, at p. 61. The essay was originally written in 1843 for the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher.