Welfare rights

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 4, Issue 1-2, 2000, Pages 27-43

  Griffin, James ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

'Ought implies can'; Human rights; Welfare; Welfare rights

Indexed keywords

EID: 3543096716     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/a:1009899901413     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Thomas Paine included minimum provision of education and welfare, and also a claim to a job, in The Rights of Man in 1792, and the French Declaration of 1793 (not the more famous one of 1789) included a right to education. But no welfare rights were included in the two most famous documents of the age, the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Many governments did, in fact, make provisions for education and later for social security, but the provisions were made simply by legislation; they were merely political arrangements, not constitutional rights. Martin P. Golding says that "An explicitly recognized conception of welfare rights" existed in the nineteenth century, and in implicit form even in the Glossators' commentaries on Roman legal texts.
2. See Martin P. Golding, "The Primacy of Welfare Rights," Social Philosophy and Policy 1 (1984), p. 124.
3. I have drawn much of my account in this section from Carl Wellman, "The Development of Human Rights," The Proliferation of Rights (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), Chapter 2.
4. "Third Generation" rights are the rights of the late twentieth century, rights not of individuals but of collectivities - say, of national or ethnic or linguistic groups. They are rights to national self-determination, the survival of one's culture, and so on. But my interest now is solely second generation rights. There is nothing surprising in the fact that welfare rights are second generation rights, that liberty rights antedated them. That in itself does not show that welfare rights are less central or authoritative. The natural rights doctrine was developed, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by middle class European and American men. Their chief concern was resistance to absolute monarchs, freedom to pursue their (largely commercial or agricultural) interests. They were in general economically secure; their relative wealth constituted an important part of the framework for their political thought - they simply took it for granted. The desperately needy had, at this time, scarcely found their voice; their poverty rendered them largely silent. The historical lateness in the appearance of welfare rights shows nothing about their importance, certainly not that they are dubious "accretions" to the "core" liberty rights. In our time, China is the main defender of welfare rights, against what they see as the one-sided advocacy of liberty rights by the United States. They argue that welfare rights have to be satisfied before liberty rights are of much value, but it would be a confusion to think, as the Chinese government seems also to think, that welfare rights must be satisfied first in time; the work of various economists [e.g., Partha Dasgupta, An Enquiry into Well-Being and Destitution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), Chapter 5] has shown that the countries that most successfully avoid welfare disasters are the ones that have most political liberties. Welfare rights are indeed prior to liberty rights in the sense that they are the necessary condition for liberty rights' being of value to us; but that does not show that they are prior in the sense that they must be realized first.
5. Carl Wellman, Welfare Rights (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Allanheld, 1982), p. 181.
6. See also Maurice Cranston, "Human Rights: Real and Supposed," in D. D. Raphael (ed.), Political Theory and the Rights of Man (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 50-51, for a similar argument.
7. Wellman, Welfare Rights, p. 163.
8. Ability also explains why we think that there may sometimes be international obligations to help. In 1996 the British Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo, told the House of Commons that Britain had a moral obligation to intervene in Bosnia to save refugees from starving because Britain was "one of the few nations on earth who have the military capability to help" (Daily Telegraph, 15 November 1996).
9. New York Times, 27 August 1996, p. 1.
10. There was (in 1996) consideration in the United States of a "five years and you're out" provision. And in New York John Marchi, a state senator, proposed an amendment that would alter the Constitution to say that the state "may" provide for the needy rather than "shall" provide for them (New York Times, 12 August 1996).
11. There is a good discussion in Wellman, Welfare Rights, pp. 31-11; see esp. p. 36.
12. E.g., Cranston, "Human Rights: Real and Supposed," p. 52.
13. James Griffin, Value Judgement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 89-92.
14. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 169-172.
15. Wellman, Welfare Rights, p. 150; my italics
16. This is a common theme in current right-wing political writing. In Britain, a right- wing think-tank, The Institute for Economic Affairs, republished Samuel Smiles' famous 1859 book, Self-Help, which describes "help from without" as "enfeebling." "Where men are subject to over-guidance and to over-government," he wrote, "the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively helpless" (see report in The Independent, 20 October 1996).
17. See e.g., Jeremy Waldron, Liberal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 18ff.
18. Isaiah Berlin, "Introduction," Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. liii.
19. See also John Rawls' distinction between the extent of liberty and its worth [A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 204] and his later comments on the distinction [in "The Basic Liberties and their Priority," in S. McMurrin (ed.), Liberty, Equality, and Law: Selected Tanner Lectures on Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)].
20. I borrow the case from Susan Moller Okin, "Liberty and Welfare: Some Issues in Human Rights Theory", in J. R. Pennock and J. W. Chapman (eds.), Human Rights, Nomos XXIII (New York: New York University Press, 1981).
21. For my own view of its importance, see Value Judgement, Chapter VII, Section 9.
22. My argument here is similar, but not identical, to one by Golding, "The Primacy of Welfare Rights," esp. pp. 135-136.