Human Rights, the State and Global Justice

Abstract

We favoured a conception of the state and international justice which appears as a viable response to the realist and cosmopolitan traditions. We have termed this a ‘complex instrumentalist’ conception. We still need to show why it is that the amendments proposed in a complex instrumentalist theory of the state to the basic premises of the natural law tradition are necessary in securing a more comprehensive range of types of international justice-claims than could be specified within the terms of classical natural law theory alone. Questions of both the justice-claims and correlative responsibilities of political communities in respect of self-determination and the practice of intervention have already been raised. We have certainly not finished with them yet. I only wish that space allowed us to treat these issues more fully and separately at this stage. But it sadly does not. Anyway, to add anything of real significance to the existing literature would probably require another book.¹ Instead, our focus is on rights - individual and collective - as grounds for at least sketching an outline of principles of world justice.