Which practice? – Rescuing the practical conception of human rights

ABSTRACT

In his The Idea of Human Rights, Charles Beitz offers a criticism of what he calls ‘naturalistic’ conceptions of human rights that has since become seminal. He argues that philosophers have largely ignored the actual practice of human rights for the purpose of their theories. As an alternative to these views, he develops a novel practical conception of human rights, whose methods take seriously the role human rights play within our international practice. While his criticism of naturalistic views remains brilliant, Beitz’s alternative proposal has its own problems: it fails to explain the normative authority of human rights as a special class of rights, and it gives too much authority to contingent facts, thereby making human rights inherently static. It might at first seem as if these problems stem from the particular methodology Beitz employs. However, I show that this is not the case. The problems can be circumvented, I argue, by sticking to Beitz’s methodology, but shifting the focus onto a different type of social practice that human rights function to govern. In order to make sense of human rights, we ought to regard them as necessary conditions of any scheme of just social cooperation.

KEYWORDS:

• Human rights
• Beitz
• social cooperation
• justice
• authority
• methodology

Acknowledgments

For helpful comments and discussions I am grateful to Johannes Haaf as well as the audience at the Braga Meetings on Ethics and Political Philosophy 2019, especially David Alvarez, Charles Beitz, Jiewuh Song, and Alain Zysset.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Compare Beitz’s endeavour with theories of punishment: a theory of punishment is incomplete if it only describes the general features of punishment. Neither does it suffice to argue why particular instances of punishment are justified. What we need from a theory of punishment is to explain why the practice of punishment as a whole is justified. The same is true for a theory of human rights: we want to know why human rights – as a special class of rights, or as a practice – is justified.

2. See chapter 2 in Beitz (2009, pp. 13–47).

3. It is interesting to note that Beitz’s concern is not so much that naturalistic models yield a human rights interpretation that is too wide – allowing for more human rights than we can actually find in the practice – but one that is too narrow, by constraining the normative scope of human rights. In contrast, constraining human rights claims is something naturalistic theorists often take as a desideratum of human rights theories. They often worry about the unfettered proliferation of human rights claims and a resulting indeterminacy and devaluation of human rights in general (Griffin, 2008, p. 93).

4. For the connection between political conceptions of human rights and corporate human rights obligations, see Corrigan (2017).

5. Cases which really are not so atypical after all: consider for example, the discussion of CEDAW in Beitz (2009, pp. 186–196).

6. Likewise, Rawls argues that human rights are not derived from a religious, or philosophical, or ethical idea of the person (Rawls, 1999, p. 81).

7. For an argument that John Rawls’s conception of human rights is best interpreted by reference to social cooperation, see Müller (2017).

8. The full article reads: (1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Luise K. Müller

Luise K. Müller is a postdoctoral researcher at TU Dresden. Her work is in political philosophy, in particular on human and animal rights, justice, political legitimacy, and AI ethics.