Human Rights

Abstract

Implicit in the preceding discussion of evaluative problems has been the notion of a ‘right’. Underlying the arguments for equality, even in the minimal sense, is the proposition that individuals are entitled to respect as moral agents capable of choice, and that to use them for collective ends as some critics maintain utilitarianism does, is to deny a basic right of equal liberty. While it is true that some systems of political philosophy make no use of human rights, and indeed may openly reject them, they feature prominently in all discussions concerning the individual and the state. In contemporary Western political theory the dispute is more likely to be about the purported content of the various statements about rights than about the intelligibility of the concept of rights itself. This is aptly illustrated by the differences between two sorts of normative liberalism. An extreme individualistic liberal (or libertarian) believes that individuals have rights, whether recognised or not by the legal system, which political authorities ought not to transgress, and uses a natural rights argument to limit severely the role of the state. By contrast, the liberal who recommends a more active role for government in society and the economy frequently justifies this by reference to a revised and more expansive conception of human rights.¹