Human Rights

Despite the critiques of philosophers and activists, the idea of human rights remains one of the most compelling, salient, and popular political doctrines of recent times. Impetus was given to this by the 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the many other attendant international and multinational agreements that have reinforced the notion that human beings as morally dignified persons are bearers of rights. The declaration offered a more robust version of what constitutes basic human rights than did most previous statements and theories. In addition to personal, political, legal, and economic rights, the framers of the declaration included a full set of social rights that they regarded as essential to a minimum level of human flourishing. These included social welfare, public education, workplace protections, and an assured living standard—in sum, the way of life to which European social democracies aspire. It is an open question whether such human rights are really more a matter of social justice than fundamental moral dignity.

Stripped of theological and metaphysical connotations, rights in the post–World War II era again became intellectually respectable among certain legal and political theorists. Some thinkers interpreted rights in a positivistic fashion, namely, a "right" properly connotes a power that an individual might reasonably expect to have vindicated by the judicial system in a particular political system. Thus, it is meaningless to assert one's "right to free speech" in an authoritarian regime or to claim a "right to same-sex marriage" in a society that has constitutionally prohibited such unions. Hence, in the positivist interpretation, the appeal to human rights cannot be deployed as the grounds for social criticism or civil disobedience.

Likewise, the analytical school of philosophy that has predominated in the English-speaking world from the middle of the twentieth century has shown an interest primarily in examining the various contexts in which rights language is asserted. Perhaps the best-known figures on this score are H. L. A. Hart (1907–1992) and A. I. Melden (1910–1991), for whom the assertion of a right is the ground of a claim, in others, an appeal to a fundamental or irreducible principle. That such grounds are not always recognized, or that they are on occasion overridden, does nothing to contradict the linguistic observation that when a person appeals to a right he or she is affirming a precept that is deemed antecedent to, rather than created or authorized by, law. Analytical theory, of course, takes this to be a point about the use of human language or logic, not about an idea that must be rooted in metaphysical truths.

One finds an analogous, if more extreme, attitude toward rights arising from postmetaphysical schools of philosophy such as poststructuralism, multiculturalism, and neopragmatism. In the view of adherents to these antifoundationalist approaches, the very attempt to impose a universal category such as "human rights" takes on authoritarian overtones. From the inherent rights perspective, Muslim women who wear traditional headdress and garb must be oppressed by their religious and patriarchal society and are in need of liberation to dress however they wish. Such a claim, for postmetaphysical theorists, reveals the inherent secular, individualistic and, ultimately, paternalistic biases of human rights doctrines.

The denial of an extraconventional grounding to rights has, however, been challenged since the late twentieth century by neonatural law theorists such as John Finnis, Germaine Grisez, and Robert George. For these thinkers, appeal to rights without some theological or metaphysical foundations is incoherent. Robert Nozick's (1938–2002) influential Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) sought to reclaim for libertarian political thought the Lockean version of natural rights theory, albeit in a modified form that circumvented the metaphysical issues implicit in Locke. The politician Tom Campbell and others attempt to capture rights language for the political in order to support progressive causes in the realms of workers' organization, indigenous peoples, and the environment. While some liberal feminists also invoke rights language, there remains skepticism about the gendered history of the promulgation of human rights that makes it difficult for many academic feminists to include rights in their intellectual arsenal.

In comparison with lingering ambivalence among contemporary thinkers concerning the assertion of human rights, popular social and legal discourse in the Western world is permeated with declarations of personal and group rights. In a famous attack on the current prevalence of rights talk, Mary Ann Glendon (b. 1938) points out the corrosive effects of constant appeals to rights. Citizens who constantly seek "their" own rights tend to think of their fellows as obstacles to fulfillment rather than partners or persons with whom they share important qualities. In this quasi-Hobbesian world in which everyone primarily seeks his or her own rights, all are ultimately frustrated in their ability to attain what they believe is rightfully "theirs."