Human Rights and Positive Duties

Ethics and International Affairs

Volumn 19, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 29-37

  Cruft, Rowan ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248037535     PISSN: 08926794     EISSN: 17477093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7093.2005.tb00487.x     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. Thomas W. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), ch. 6, 7, and 8. All in-text citation references are to this book.
2. See, e.g., Alan Gewirth, The Community of Rights (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 33–38
3. Onora O'Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 128–36.
4. See, e.g., Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 57.
5. This is a common assumption, implicit in the work of many writers. It is explicit in Narveson, The Libertarian Idea, pp. 57–58
6. Jeff Jordan, “Why Negative Rights Only?” Southern Journal of Philosophy 29, no. 2 (1991), pp. 245–55.
7. See Rowan Cruft,“Rights: Beyond Interest Theory and Will Theory?” Law and Philosophy 23, no. 3 (2004), pp. 359–60.
8. See, e.g., Gewirth, The Community of Rights, ch. 2.
9. The interpretation of Locke on p. 138 especially lends itself to a “left-libertarian” reading. For similar approaches, see Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)
10. Michael Otsuka, Libertarianism without Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
11. Joseph Raz offers an individualistic theory of rights when he writes that X has a right if “an aspect of X's well-being (his interest) is a sufficient reason for holding some other person(s) to be under a duty.”See Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 166.
12. On Raz's view, as expressed here, for each right the right-holder's interest (rather than her Poggean basic need) is of sufficient importance on its own to constitute a justifying reason for the existence of that right, independently of whether the right would serve the collective interest. Several theorists have drawn attention to the inadequacy of nonindividualistic accounts of human rights-such accounts would deny human rights to people whenever this would best serve collective goals. See, e.g., John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 27.