Elements of a theory of human rights

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 32, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 315-356

  Sen, Amartya ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 14644424117     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2004.00017.x     Document Type: Article

References (160)

1. International Human Rights in Context: Law, Politics and Morals, ed. Henry J. Steiner and Philip Alston (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
2. Richard Falk, Human Rights Horizons: The Pursuit of Justice in a Globalizing World (New York: Routledge, 2000).
3. Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
4. Micheline R. Ishay, The Human Rights Reader:Major Political Writings, Essays, Speeches, and Documents from the Bible to the Present (New York: Routledge, 1997).
5. Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies; Being an Examination of the Declaration of Rights Issued during the French Revolution (1792).
6. republished in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. II, ed. J. Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843), p. 501.
7. Ivan Hare, "Social Rights as Foundational Human Rights," in Social and Labour Rights in Global Context, ed. Bob Hepple (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
8. William F. Felice, The Global New Deal: Economic and Social Human Rights in World Politics (Lanham: Rowman&Littlefield, 2003)
9. Cass R. Sunstein, After the Rights Revolution: Reconceiving the Regulatory State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990)
10. Thomas W. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (London: Polity Press, 2002).
11. The reasoning behind such rejection has been powerfully presented by Maurice Cranston, "Are There Any Human Rights?" Daedalus (1983): 1-17.
12. Onora O'Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
13. the critique of Michael Ignatieff, supporting some claims to human rights while strongly disputing others, in Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
14. There are different variants of these two contrasting positions, and also other alternatives that differ from both, which are helpfully discussed and distinguished in Charles Beitz, "Human Rights as a Common Concern," American Political Science Review 95 (June 2001): 269-82.
15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788), trans. L. W. Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956).
16. I have discussed, in an earlier paper, the relevance of the Kantian distinction between "perfect" and "imperfect" obligations even for a largely consequentialist framework. "Consequential Evaluation and Practical Reason," Journal of Philosophy 97 (2000): 477-502.
17. Some of the central issues are discussed by John Mackie, "Can There Be a Rightsbased Moral Theory?" Studies in Ethical Theory: Midwest Studies in Philosophy 3
18. Peter A. French, et al. (Morris : University of Minnesota, 1978).
19. Reprinted in Theories of Rights, ed. Jeremy Waldron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 168-81.
20. This applies not only to the persistence of interpersonal disagreements, but also to specific areas of unresolved disputes within one person's own reasoned assessment. An adequate theory of rationality has to make room for such "incompleteness" of assessment. The general issue of admissibility of incompleteness is discussed in my Collective Choice and Social Welfare (San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1970
21. republished, Amsterdam: North- Holland, 1979); "Maximization and the Act of Choice," Econometrica 65 (1997): 745-80
22. reprinted in Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002)
23. "Incompleteness and Reasoned Choice," Synthese (forthcoming 2004)
24. Isaac Levi, Hard Choices: Decision Making under Unresolved Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
25. Hilary Putnam, "Über die Rationalität von Präferenzen," Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 21 (1996): 204-28
26. English version, "On the Rationality of Preferences," in his The Collapse of the Fact / Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).
27. Jeremy Waldron has argued, disagreement about rights "is a sign-the best possible sign in modern circumstances-that people take rights seriously." Law and Disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 311.
28. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London: Payne, 1789; republished, Oxford: Clarendon Press)
29. Henry Sidgwick, The Method of Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1874)
30. A. C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare (London: MacMillan, 1920)
31. Frank P. Ramsey, Foundations: Essays in Philosophy, Logic, Mathematics and Economics (London: Routledge, 1978)
32. Richard M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963)
33. J.C.B. Gosling, Pleasure and Desire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969)
34. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)
35. R. E. Goodin, "Laundering Preferences," in The Foundations of Social Choice Theory, ed. Jon Elster and Aanund Hylland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp 75-101
36. James Griffin, Well-being (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)
37. John Broome Weighing Goods (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); among many other contributions.
38. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics. trans. David Ross, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980)
39. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (London, 1861; republished London: Collins/Fontana, 1962).
40. I have discussed the issues involved in "Plural Utility," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 81 (1980-81): 193-215.
41. John F. Nash, "The Bargaining Problem," Econometrica 18 (1950): 155-62
42. John C. Harsanyi, "Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics, and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility," Journal of Political Economy 63 (1955): 309-21
43. James A. Mirrlees, "An Exploration of the Theory of Optimum Income Taxation," Review of Economic Studies 38 (1971): 175-208.
44. These issues are discussed in Amartya Sen, "Interpersonal Aggregation and Partial Comparability," Econometrica 38 (1970): 393-409.
45. Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982; republished, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997)
46. Charles Blackorby, "Degrees of Cardinality and Aggregate Partial Orderings," Econometrica 43 (1975): 845-52.
47. Ben J. Fine, "A Note on 'Interpersonal Aggregation and Partial Comparability'," Econometrica 43 (1975): 169-72.
48. Interpersonal Comparisons of Well-beings, ed. Jon Elster and John Roemer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
49. Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies, in Collected Works, vol. II, p. 523.
50. Accepting a general contrast between the respective categories of ethical assertions and legal pronouncements does not, of course, deny the possibility that ethical views may contribute to the interpretation and, thus, the substantive content of laws. The recognition of that possibility may go against a strictly positivist theory of law (on which see Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985]).
51. This understanding does not, however, obliterate the motivational and substantive distinction between primarily ethical claims and principally legal proclamations.
52. The importance of rights and freedoms can, of course, be combined with incorporating the significance of utility or well-being in ethical reasoning, but if such a "combined" system is to be pursued, some consistency problems will have to be faced in devising a coherent and integrated social choice procedure; on this see Amartya Sen, "The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal," Journal of Political Economy 78 (1970): 152-57.
53. Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), essays 12-14 and 20-22.
54. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), and the special number of Analyse & Kritik 18 (1996)
55. on "the Liberal Paradox," particularly Kotaro Suzumura, "Welfare, Rights and Social Choice Procedures," pp. 20-37.
56. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution (1791)
57. second part, Combining Principle and Practice (1792).
58. republished, The Rights of Man (London: Dent, and New York: Dutton, 1906)
59. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
60. republished, The Rights of Woman (London: Dent, and New York: Dutton, 1929)
61. H. L. A. Hart, "Are There Any Natural Rights?" The Philosophical Review 64 (1955)
62. reprinted in Theories of Rights, ed. Jeremy Waldron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 79.
63. On this see Maurice Cranston, "Are There Any Human Rights?"
64. The framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 hoped, in fact, that this declaration would serve as a template for bills of rights in different nations, with national courts taking a lead in their enforcement.
65. Mary Ann Glendon's wonderful account of that remarkable history, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001).
66. Since the Gilbert Murray Lecture given at Oxford in November 2002, in which this article originated, was arranged by OXFAM (Gilbert Murray was one of OXFAM's founders), it was also a suitable occasion to discuss this broader connection of human rights with a plurality of ways of pursuing them.
67. However, the ethical force of freedoms can help to generate claims on others. On different aspects of the "entanglements" between descriptive and evaluative concerns
68. Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact / Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002)
69. William Van Orman Quine, "Two Dogmas, Of Empiricism," in his From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 20-46
70. Vivian Walsh, "Philosophy and Economics," in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, ed. John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 861-69.
71. The evaluative framework of substantive freedoms can provide a more robust appreciation of a person's inability to achieve what they have reason to value. On this see my "Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984," Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985): 169-220
72. Inequality Reexamined; and Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999).
73. However, in the second case (that is, the entitlement to necessary medical care), we shall have to discuss whether this type of a "welfare right," or more generally, economic and social rights, can be seen as human rights, and this examination will be taken up in Section VIII.
74. Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), particularly my Arrow Lectures ("Freedom and Social Choice") included there: essays 20 through 22.
75. More complex features of the opportunity aspect and the process aspect of freedoms are also discussed in my Arrow Lectures ("Freedom and Social Choice") in Rationality and Freedom, essays 20 through 22.
76. On the concept of capability, see my "Equality of What?" in Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. I, ed. Sterling M. McMurrin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, and Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1980), pp. 197-220
77. Commodities and Capabilities (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1985)
78. jointly edited with Martha Nussbaum, The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). The approach is powerfully developed and applied
79. Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
80. the related theories of substantial opportunities developed by Richard Arneson, "Equality and Equality of Opportunity for Welfare," Philosophical Studies 56 (1989): 77-112
81. G. A. Cohen, "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice," Ethics 99 (1989): 906-44
82. John E. Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), among others contributors.
83. The importance of this variability for a theory of justice is discussed in my "Justice: Means versus Freedoms," Philosophy & Public Affairs 19 (1990): 111-22
84. Differences in the capability to function can arise even with the same set of personal means (such as primary goods) for a variety of reasons, such as (1) personal heterogeneities (related, for example, to disability, or proneness to illness), (2) environmental diversities (such as climatic conditions, or varying threats from epidemic diseases or from local crime), (3) variations in non-personal resources (such as the nature of public health care, or social cohesion), or (4) different relative positions vis-à-vis others (well illustrated by Adam Smith's discussion, in the Wealth of Nations, of the fact that the clothing and other resources one needs "to appear in public without shame" depends on what other people standardly wear and how they typically live in that society).
85. The need for an explicit valuational exercise is, thus, seen as an advantage, rather than a limitation of the capability approach. For arguments in different directions on this issue
86. Charles R. Beitz, "Amartya Sen's Resources, Values and Development," Economics and Philosophy 2 (1986): 282-90
87. Bernard Williams, "The Standard of Living: Interests and Capabilities," in Amartya Sen et al., The Standard of Living, ed. Geoffrey Hawthorn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 94-102
88. Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined, and "Capability and Well-being," in The Quality of Life, ed. Nussbaum and Sen, pp. 31-53.
89. The capability approach can allow considerable difference in application. For a somewhat different perspective, see Martha Nussbaum, "Nature, Function, and Capability: Aristotle on Political Distribution," Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Supplementary Volume (1988), pp. 145-54.
90. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Nussbaum has discussed the importance of identifying an overarching "list of capabilities," with given priorities, in a more Aristotelian way. My own reluctance to join the search for such a canonical list arises partly from my difficulty in seeing how the exact lists and weights would be chosen without appropriate specification of the context of their use (which could vary), but also from a disinclination to accept any substantive diminution of the domain of public reasoning. The framework of capabilities, as I see it, helps to clarify and illuminate the subject matter of public reasoning, which can involve epistemic issues (including claims of objective importance) as well as ethical and political ones. It does not-and cannot-displace the need for public reasoning.
91. Susan Okin, "Poverty, Well-being and Gender: What Counts, Who's Heard?" Philosophy & Public Affairs 31 (2003): 280-316.
92. On related issues see also Joshua Cohen, "Review of Sen's Inequality Reexamined," Journal of Philosophy 92 (1994): 275-88, esp. 278-80.
93. G. A. Cohen, "Review: Amartya Sen's Unequal World," The New Left Review (1995): 117-29, esp. 120-25.
94. I have discussed this issue in "Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984." It is also important to examine how the concept of "freedom" links with a broadly defined idea of "interest," which underlies Joseph Raz's reasoned diagnosis: "Rights ground requirement for action in the interest of other beings." See The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 180.
95. G. A. Cohen has presented arguments in favor of focusing on achieved functionings-related to his concept of "midfare"-rather than on capability; see his "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice," and "Equality of What? On Welfare, Resources and Capabilities," in The Quality of Life, ed. Nussbaum and Sen, pp. 125-41
96. Richard Arneson, "Equality and Equality of Opportunity for Welfare," Philosophical Studies 56 (1989): 77-112.
97. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, with Friedrich Engels, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 190.
98. Though this is not the occasion to provide a critical assessment of "multiculturalism" as a social policy, it is perhaps worth noting here that there is a big difference between (1) valuing multiculturalism because of the way, and to the extent that, it enhances the freedoms of the people involved to choose to live as they would like (and have reason to like); and (2) valuing cultural diversity per se, which focuses on the descriptive characteristics of a societal pattern, rather than on the freedoms of the people involved.
99. Capability is also central to the relationship between multiculturalism and gender equity. The important question that Susan Okin asks in her joint book, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?
100. J. Cohen, M. Howard and M. C. Nussbaum (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), turns, to a great extent, on possible tensions between multiculturalism and the freedom of individual persons (in this case, women) within a community to freely consider and choose how they would live.
101. The plurality of concerns, involving processes as well as opportunities, which is inescapably involved in normative collective choice (including theories of justice), is discussed in my Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970).
102. "Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984," Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985)., Since I have seen it asserted that I propound a "capability-based theory of justice," I should make it absolutely clear that this could be true only in the rather limited sense of naming something according to a principal part of it (comparable with, say, using England for Great Britain, or Holland for the Netherlands).
103. my Collective Choice and Social Welfare, particularly chapters 5 through 9, and "Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984." The issues involved are more fully addressed in my forthcoming book Freedom and Justice, to be published by Harvard University Press.
104. It was indeed in the context of identifying an inadequacy in the Rawlsian focus on primary goods in the Difference Principle, for judging distributional equity, that the use of the capability perspective was proposed in my 1979 Tanner Lectures, published as "Equality of What?" (1980).
105. In judging distributional equity, the capability perspective also has, I believe, advantages over the concentration on what Ronald Dworkin calls "resources" in "What Is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources," Philosophy & Public Affairs 10 (1981): 185-243.
106. Dworkin has recently argued that on one interpretation, there is no substantial difference between my focus on capability and his focus on resources, while on another interpretation, he is just right and I am plain wrong (Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000]).
107. I resist the temptation, which I must confess is fairly strong, to join that debate in this article.
108. The rationale and reach of a consequence-sensitive framework for this type of ethical reasoning have been investigated in my essays "Rights and Agency," Philosophy & Public Affairs 11 (1982): 3-39
109. "Positional Objectivity," Philosophy & Public Affairs 22 (1993): 126-45
110. "Consequential Evaluation and Practical Reason," Journal of Philosophy 97 (2000)
111. Making adequate room for parametric variations is a general feature of rational assessment, and not a characteristic only of ethical reasoning in particular. I have discussed this issue in Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), essays 1 through 5.
112. The centrality of that general question is powerfully discussed by Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
113. In this analysis I do not go into the distinction between agent-specific and agentneutral moral evaluations. The present line of characterization can be further extended through making room for "position specific" assessments, in ways that I have tried to investigate in "Rights and Agency," and "Positional Objectivity." 45. The admissibility of inescapable ambiguities within a framework of rational assessment is discussed in my "Internal Consistency of Choice," Econometrica 61 (1993): 495-521
114. "Maximization and the Act of Choice," Econometrica 65 (1997): 745-79
115. both reprinted in Rationality and Freedom. See also Inequality Reexamined, pp. 46-49, 131-35.
116. Andrew Ashworth and Eva Steiner, "Criminal Omissions and Public Duties: The French Experience," Legal Studies 10 (1990): 153-64
117. Glanville Williams, "Criminal Omissions: The Conventional View," Law Quarterly Review 107 (1991): 86-98.
118. As Charles Beitz has pointed out, human rights play "the role of a moral touchstone- a standard of assessment and criticism for domestic institutions, a standard of aspiration for their reform, and increasingly a standard of evaluation for the policies and practices of international economic and political organizations
119. "Human Rights as a Common Concern," p. 269.
120. Analyses of the content of the right to development have been presented in United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2000 (New York: United Nations, 2000)
121. S. R. Osmani, "Human Rights to Food, Health, and Education," mimeographed, UNDP and the University of Ulster, 2000
122. Arjun Sengupta, "Development Policy and the Right to Development," Frontline, February 7-March 2, 2001
123. Arjun Sengupta, Asborn Eide, Stephen Marks, and Bård Anders Andreassen, "The Right to Development and Human Rights in Development," presented at the Nobel Symposium in Oslo on Right to Development, October 2003.
124. It is also worth noting that even when the agents involved in activist promotion of human rights do not have any special legal status, they can still make a difference to political, social and administrative practice through the use of existing laws, combined with seeking public disclosures and critical debates. For example, unlike the Indian and South African Human Rights Commissions, which are recognized in the respective national laws, the Pakistan Human Rights Commission is basically just an NGO, and yet under the visionary and courageous leadership of
125. Asma Jahangir, I. A. Rehman, and others, it has been remarkably effective in identifying and resisting violations of human rights, and in defending vulnerable persons, including religious minorities and ill-treated women. For a good discussion of some of these supportive activities
126. The State of Human Rights, 2001 (Lahore: Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, 2002).
127. The importance and social reach of woman's participation in family decisions is discussed in my Development as Freedom, ch. 8, "Women's Agency and Social Change."
128. For an early advocacy of a much broader approach, see Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792).
129. Sunstein, After the Rights Revolution: Reconceiving the Regulatory State.
130. Onora O'Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue, pp. 131-119
131. her Bounds of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
132. Cranston, "Are There Any Human Rights?" p. 13.
133. For this reason, I would argue, it would be a misapplication to invoke the familiar principle "ought implies can" to suggest that claims that are not yet fully realizable cannot be taken to be rights at all. To see the ethical force of some claims is also a demand to consider what one should do to make them realizable, for example through working for the development of new institutions.
134. This corresponds to what Charles Beitz calls the "practical conception" of human rights: "To say something is a human right is to say that social institutions that fail to protect the right are defective" with the implication that "international efforts to aid or promote reform are legitimate and in some cases may be morally required." ("Human Rights and the Law of Peoples," in The Ethics of Assistance:Morality and the Distant Needy ed. Deen Chatterjee [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], p. 210
135. Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980; 2nd ed., 1996].)
136. Even though this requirement has a largely procedural form, the very insistence on open public discussion from which no one is excluded involves an acceptance of equality, which has substantive implications also for the content of the deliberation. On the substantive aspects of deliberative democracy
137. Joshua Cohen, "Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy," in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 95-119.
138. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
139. Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 110-13.
140. On related matters, see also Amy Guttman and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996)
141. Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib.
142. particularly John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999)
143. See also Rawls's formulation of the original position in Political Liberalism, p. 12
144. "I assume that the basic structure is that of a closed society: that is, we are to regard it as self-contained and as having no relations with other societies. . . . That a society is closed is a considerable abstraction, justified only because it enables us to focus on certain main questions free from distracting details." If my reasoning is right, the Rawlsian restrictions eliminate much more than the influence of "distracting details."
145. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; rev. ed., 1790; republished, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), III, 1, 2, p. 110.
146. The Smithian perspective on moral reasoning is pursued in my "Open and Closed Impartiality," The Journal of Philosophy 99 (2002): 445-69.
147. Quoted in Steven Lukes, "Five Fables about Human Rights," in The Human Rights Reader, ed. Micheline R. Ishay (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 238.
148. Rosa Luxemburg, "The National Question and Autonomy," The Human Rights Reader, p. 291.
149. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
150. Gertrude Himmelfarb, "The Illusions of Cosmopolitanism," in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism / Martha Nussbaum with Respondents, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), pp. 74-75.
151. See my Development as Freedom, ch. 10. Also "Human Rights and Asian Values," The New Republic, July 14 and 21, 1997, pp. 33-40.
152. "The Reach of Reason: East and West," The New York Review of Books, July 20, 2000, pp. 33-38.
153. "Democracy and Its Global Roots," The New Republic, October, 2003, pp. 28-35.
154. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (Boston: Little, Brown&Co, 1994), p. 21.
155. Beitz, "Human Rights as a Common Concern," pp. 279-80.
156. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (rev. ed., 1790, V.2.15; republished, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 210.
157. I have discussed this issue in "Open and Closed Impartiality," Journal of Philosophy 99 (2002): 445-69.
158. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and P. G. Stein (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978; reprinted, Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1982), p. 104.
159. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, III, 1, 2, p. 110.
160. The treatment of prisoners held by the United States in the so-called war against terrorism raises important issues of human rights, and the analysis of the prevailing practice can be helped by more wide-ranging public discussion and a fuller understanding of the nature of global concerns on this issue.