Equality and human rights

politics, philosophy & economics

Volumn 4, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 69-90

  Buchanan, Allen ^a  

^a DUKE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

basic interests; decent human life; egalitarianism; equality; minimalism; minimally good life; Modest Objectivist View; opportunity for a decent life; transnational justice

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248039917     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X05049436     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. Reference to human rights and to the commitment to human rights as an expression of egalitarianism is largely absent in the influential works on equality such as G.A. Cohen, ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’, Ethics 99 (1989): 906-44; Richard Arneson, ‘Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare’, Philosophical Studies 56 (1989): 77-93; John Roemer, ‘Equality of Resources Implies Equality of Welfare’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 101 (1986): 751-84. Amartya Sen's view that fundamental human equality requires that all have what he calls central human capabilities has important implications for how we are to understand human rights, but Sen has not attempted to ground the conventional list of human rights in his theory of capabilities or to use that theory to evaluate critically the conventional list. See Amartya K. Sen, Development as Freedom, 1st edn. (New York: Knopf, 1999). Martha Nussbaum has been more explicit about the possibility of grounding human rights in a theory of capabilities, but has not pursued this project in any detail and generally has not connected her notion of fundamental equality as treating everyone as an end with the recent philosophical literature on equality. See Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Ronald Dworkin, one of the most influential contributors to the contemporary debate about equality, has focused chiefly on equality in the context of the single state, rather than in the international human rights context. Dworkin assumes that although equal concern and respect are owed to all of our fellow citizens (at least in a liberal democracy), a weaker equality is appropriate for our relations with non-citizens, including persons in other countries. See Ronald Dworkin, ‘What is Equality? Part 1: Equality of Welfare’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 10 (1981): 185-246 and ‘What is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 10 (1981): 283-345. So far he has not developed a theory of human rights, however. References to human rights were absent in John Rawls's work until The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). However, Rawls's view of human rights in that work is surprisingly antiegalitarian, insofar as his truncated list of human rights permits serious and systematic, institutionalized inequalities, for example, between men and women. For criticisms of Rawls's view of human rights, see the following: Fernando Tesón, A Philosophy of International Law (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), pp. 109–22; James W. Nickel, ‘Rawls on Human Rights’, unpublished paper; Allen Buchanan, ‘Justice, Legitimacy, and Human Rights’, in The Idea of a Political Liberalism, edited by Victoria Davion and Clark Wolf (Totowa, NJ: Roman & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 73–89; Allen Buchanan, ‘Towards an Institutional Theory of Human Rights’ unpublished paper.
2. Here Amartya Sen is an exception. Yet his work on the ‘Equality of what?’ question, in which he engages the analytic philosophers writing on equality, does not make explicit his views on human rights. See Amartya Sen, ‘Equality of What?’ in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Vol. 1, edited by Sterling McMurrin (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1980), pp. 195–220. Moreover, his work on international development has not explicitly drawn the implications for human rights of his views on capabilities.
3. The authors of the egalitarian literature of concern in this article are for the most part located in the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the USA.
4. See, for example, Jack Donnelly, International Human Rights, 2nd edn. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998); Rhoda Howard-Hassmann, Human Rights and the Search for Community (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995). Michael Perry recognizes that the justification for human rights norms depends upon a fundamental commitment to equality and argues that this commitment only makes sense from within a religious perspective. Although he rejects all secular philosophical groundings for human rights, he does not engage the philosophical literature on egalitarianism. See Michael Perry, The Idea of Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). In Perry's defense, one might note that the philosophical egalitarian literature largely either ignores the fundamental question of why we ought to treat others as equals, focusing instead on an explication of what it is to treat them as equals (the ‘equality of what?’ question) or simply appeals to intuitions about equality, as with the claim that people should be compensated for disadvantages that they have neither chosen nor deserve.
5. Buchanan, ‘Towards an Institutional Theory of Human Rights’.
6. By the major human rights conventions I mean the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, the Convention on Eliminating All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Genocide Convention. For all these documents and other human rights conventions, see Henry J. Steiner and Philip Alston (editors), International Human Rights In Context: Law, Politics, and Morals, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
7. It can be argued that some human rights, such as the right to freedom of expression, also include immunities. This point is due to George Rainbolt.
8. Allen Buchanan, ‘Justice as Reciprocity Versus Subject-Centered Justice’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 19 (1990): 227-52.
9. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, p. 1376, and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, p. 1381, both in Steiner and Alston, International Human Rights In Context. For indications of the important role of the concept of inherent dignity in the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, see Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New (New York: Random House, 2001), pp. 174–5.
10. This is not to say that justice is institutional in the sense that principles of justice apply primarily to institutions, and to individuals derivatively via their place in institutional arrangements. Nor is it to say that individuals have rights only by virtue of their being co-participants with us in a common cooperative scheme. Lastly, the Modest Objectivist View does not assume that we have moral obligations to persons, including those that are implied by human rights norms, only to the extent that we interact with them. For a critique of institutionalist and interactionist conceptions of justice, including those that limit relations of justice to those who share a cooperative scheme, see Allen Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self- Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 73–117.
11. For a lucid critique of the assumption that human rights are natural rights, see Charles R. Beitz, ‘Human Rights as a Common Concern’, American Political Science Review 95 (2001): 269-87; Charles R. Beitz, ‘Human Rights and the Law of Peoples’, in The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy, edited by Deen K. Chaterjee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 196–8.
12. President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, Securing Access to Health Care, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 1983), pp. 42–7; Allen Buchanan, ‘The Right to a Decent Minimum of Health Care’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 13 (1984): 55-78.
13. Allen Buchanan, Dan W. Brock, Norman Daniels and Daniel Wikler, From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 94–8.
14. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 24, in Steiner and Alston, International Human Rights in Context, p. 1379; International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, Article 12, in Steiner and Alston, International Human Rights in Context, p. 1398.
15. Buchanan, ‘Towards an Institutional Theory of Human Rights’.
16. Steiner and Alston, International Human Rights in Context, p. 1388.
17. For a valuable collection of essays on the question of ‘Asian values’, see Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell (editors), The East Asian Challenge to Human Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
18. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Sen, Development as Freedom, pp. 51–3.
19. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, pp. 1–4, 24-30; Sen, Development as Freedom, pp. 115–6.
20. Allen Buchanan, Ethics, Efficiency, and the Market (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985), pp. 64–86; Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self- Determination, pp. 88–93.