What is the point of human rights?

Against human rights minimalism

Abstract

This article offers a moral and logical critique of human rights minimalism, by which is meant an account that restricts human rights to a level of sufficiency above or beyond which inequalities have no moral relevance, and which makes duties prior to rights, such that rights are dependent on assumed or actual institutional capacities. The argument is that human rights minimalism fails by its own standards – to represent moral equality – on two counts. First, it is predicated on a principle of moral equality of human beings, yet can produce no arguments against even the starkest inequalities of living conditions. Second, by making rights a dependent variable to the reasonableness of duties, what rights people have will in effect be the product of contingent institutional capacities. For a truly egalitarian commitment to human rights, minimalism is the wrong philosophy. A point made is that inequality is politically constructed, and institutional capacities will partly be a function of such constructed inequalities. Any reasonable account of human rights needs to have resources within itself to criticise those constructed inequalities that negatively affect institutional capacities to protect and promote rights. With inspiration from Anderson’s analysis of the point of equality, it is argued here that human rights have a dual rationale: a negative one to end oppression, and a positive one to establish a political culture of democratic equality.