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Normative and Theoretical
Foundations of Human Rights
Anthony J. Langlois
Chapter Contents
Introduction 12
The Emergence of Rights Language 12
The Revolutionary Uses of Human Rights 12
Philosophical Questions 13
Modern Human Rights 15
The Universalism of Human Rights 19
Human Rights as a Political Project 23
Conclusion 24
Reader’s Guide
Human rights have come to provide a powerful basis for an ethical critique of interna-
tional politics and policy. This chapter examines the theoretical basis for the normative
ideas advanced by those who offer critiques using the language of human rights. It
recognizes that the idea of human rights has a philosophical and a political history,
a history that emerges out of political liberalism, and one that resonates still in many
of the contemporary controversies surrounding the development and use of human
rights. The rhetoric of human rights declares the idea to be universal; in this chapter we
look at the various ways in which this claim may be interpreted, including the views of
cultural relativists and others who deny the universality of human rights. The chapter
concludes by emphasizing the way in which the human rights agenda is deeply polit-
ical: it privileges a certain set of normative commitments that its proponents hope will
become, in time, the ethical constitution of the international system.
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12 A. J. LANGLOIS
Introduction
face of injustices they experienced—that their universal
human rights were being abused. Today, however, the
language of human rights has become globally recog-
nized as a response to injustice. e way in which we
think about this transition, the emergence and spread
of the idea of rights, is important for the way in which
we seek to justify and theorize human rights.
Understanding the history of the human rights idea is
essential to understanding the debates and problems
that arise when we try to theorize human rights. Despite
the rhetoric of human rights—that they are universal,
inalienable, inherent, and so on—the contemporary
usage of rights is a very recent a air, emergent out of the
history of the West. Neither Socrates nor Jesus, neither
Confucius nor the Buddha, would have claimed—in the
The Emergence of Rights Language
of society, individuality, freedom, liberty, government,
and religion. ese conceptions lay the groundwork for
human rights—or, as they were called at the time, the
rights of man. As these subversive ideas gained critical
in uence, they began to appear in the political docu-
ments known as rights declarations.
ese documents, the most important of which
were dra ed in the nal decades of the 1700s, are the
early rhetorical and legal masterpieces of rights politics
(Fields, 2003, p. 22). ey were created under the in u-
ence of both a long chain of political events and the
intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment. e former
included crucial historical events, such as the illegal and
confused but fabulously daring trial of King Charles I
of England, in 1649 (Kamenka, 1978). With this trial,
the English Monarch’s rights were made a function of
the rights of the people. ese same rights were to be
discussed and promoted by a host of Enlightenment
philosophes over the ensuing 130 years. Despite their
di erences with one another, these thinkers demanded
individual freedom from absolutist control.
Rights language did not appear out of a vacuum, but
developed gradually through Western political history,
reaching its rst golden age in the European Enlight-
enment. Prior to the Enlightenment, social, moral,
and political values were spoken of in relation to the
right—that is, in relation to an objective moral order
that stood over and above all people. is order was
conceptualized as the natural law, which, a er the rise
of Christianity, became associated with the Church.
Under the natural law, people had duties to one another
and to God; rights were derived from the duties we
owed one another under God. e practice of claim-
ing modern secular rights, rights that have as their
focus the subjective freedoms and liberties of individu-
als rather than objective right (the divinely sanctioned
moral order of the day), is associated with the long
development of the idea of individual liberty, culminat-
ing in the Enlightenment.
e rights claimed in the Enlightenment made sense
to the people of that period because they had been
preceded by the development of speci c conceptions
The Revolutionary Uses of Human Rights
the ‘age of rights’: the US Declaration of Independence
of 1776 (see Box 1.1). While not the rst American
rights document (there had been a Bill of Rights in
It was this demand for freedom that led American
colonists to revolt against their British masters, a revolt
that led to the creation of the rst grand document of
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NORMATIVE AND THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS 13
1774 in the First Continental Congress; and the state of
Virginia also declared a Bill of Rights on 12 June 1776),
the Declaration of Independence penned by omas Jef-
ferson (1743–1826) gave poetic and radical voice to the
claim that all men (sic) should be free to live indepen-
dently and with equality (Lauren, 1998, p. 17). Je erson
argued that people are entitled to a bill of rights to guard
their freedoms against all governments. Americans
subsequently gained these entitlements through the
US Constitution (1789) and its rst ten amendments,
which constitute the Bill of Rights (1791).
In France, too, revolution against a despotic monarch
and regime led to the creation of that other grand rights
document: e Declaration of the Rights of Man and
of the Citizen (1789—see Box 1.1). e French were
inspired by the Americans—indeed, key French citizens
had fought in the American Revolutionary War—and
they sought to secure rights, not just for their country-
men, but for everyone: ‘all men are born free and equal
in rights’ (Article 1, emphasis added).
ese Declarations encapsulate what we now call
liberal democracy. ey do not merely set out an action
plan for short-term political goals; rather, they articulate
a philosophical account of what it means to have legiti-
mate government (Kamenka, 1978). Central to this is an
egalitarian philosophy of what it means to be human.
Box 1.1 Revolutionary Statements of Human Rights
From the United States Declaration of Independence
(1776).
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. . . . That to
secure these rights, Governments are instituted among
Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed, . . . That whenever any Form of Government
becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of
the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
Government, laying its foundation on such principles and
organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem
most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
From the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
the Citizen (1789).
The representatives of the French people, organized as a
National Assembly, believing that the ignorance, neglect, or
contempt of the rights of man are the sole cause of public
calamities and of the corruption of governments, have
determined to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural,
unalienable, and sacred rights of man, in order that this
declaration, being constantly before all the members of the
Social body, shall remind them continually of their rights
and duties; in order that the acts of the legislative power,
as well as those of the executive power, may be compared
at any moment with the objects and purposes of all
political institutions and may thus be more respected, and,
lastly, in order that the grievances of the citizens, based
hereafter upon simple and incontestable principles, shall
tend to the maintenance of the constitution and redound
to the happiness of all. Therefore the National Assembly
recognizes and proclaims, in the presence and under the
auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man
and of the citizen:
Article 1: Men are born and remain free and equal in
rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the
general good.
Article 2: The aim of all political association is the
preservation of the natural and imprescriptable rights
of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and
resistance to oppression.
Philosophical Questions
Philosophical Foundations
e di culty concerned the underlying philosophy
from which the notion of rights was derived. e rights
described in the Declarations are moral ideas known
as natural rights, derived from the natural law, which
e political consequences of these rights declarations
continue to escalate today. But ever since these rights
were rst mooted, they have been dogged by philo-
sophical questioning. Natural and imprescriptable
rights had their critics; and even those who wished to
embrace such rights had questions.
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14 A. J. LANGLOIS
in Christian civilization had to do with the moral char-
acter given by God to his creation. is is very clear,
for example, when one reads the work of John Locke
(1632–1704), who laid the foundation for much of the
subsequent enthusiasm about rights. However, this
period in which the early rights theorizing occurred was
also the period in which Christian theism gradually lost
its hold on the allegiance of the philosophes. e reason
of man came to replace the word of God as the highest
authority, fracturing the logic of natural law and duty
that lay behind the Christian natural rights framework
(Waldron, 1987). New theories were developed—by
Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and omas Hobbes (1588–
1679), for example—that sought to derive rights, not
from the natural law (ordained by God), but from our
basic humanity. While these theories were for a time
quelled by powerful restatements of natural law the-
ories (such as Samuel Pufendorf’s (1632–1694)), they
nonetheless added to the cultural shi that highlighted
the moral autonomy of the individual, undermined
the derivative natural law–duty–rights structure, and
focused the popular imagination on the idea of basic,
inalienable, rights—natural rights that could be derived
from our natural humanity, not from God’s natural law
(Haakonssen, 1991, p. 61). Over time, the natural rights
idea became more and more politically e cacious; it
also became more philosophically tenuous. If natural
rights were no longer justi ed by direct appeal to God
via the natural law, how were they to be justi ed? Nature
by itself evinced a bewildering array of values, with no
consensus about which were the correct ones. It seemed
that the fate of natural rights was to be a political idea
that came too late to be awarded philosophical respect-
ability (Waldron, 1987, p. 13).
Early Critics of Rights
By the time of the Rights Declarations, key philosophers
were forcefully attacking the idea of natural rights. ese
attacks came from across the philosophical spectrum—
from conservatives, liberals (particularly utilitarians),
and socialists (see Box 1.2).
Box 1.2 The Philosophers on the Rights of Man
Bentham (1748–1832)
How stands the truth of things? That there are no such
things as natural rights—no such things as rights anterior
to the establishment of government—no such things as
natural rights opposed to, in contradistinction to, legal: that
the expression is merely fi gurative; that when used, in the
moment you attempt to give it a literal meaning it leads to
error, and to that sort of error that leads to mischief—to the
extremity of mischief. (‘Anarchical Fallacies’, see Bentham
(1843))
Burke (1729–1797)
As to the share of power, authority, and direction which
each individual ought to have in the management of the
state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original
right of man in civil society; for I have in my contemplation
the civil social man, and no other. It is a thing to be settled
by convention. (Refl ections on the Revolution in France, see
Burke (1971))
Marx (1818–1883)
Thus none of the so called rights of man goes beyond
egoistic man, man as he is in civil society, namely an
individual withdrawn behind his private interests and
whims and separated from the community. Far from the
rights of man conceiving of man as a species-being . . . The
only bond that holds them together is natural necessity,
need and private interest, the conservation of their property
and egoistic person. (‘On “the Jewish Question” ’, see Marx
(1987))
Hobbes (1588–1679)
The Right of Nature . . . is the Liberty each man hath, to use
his own power, as he will himselfe, for the preservation
of his own nature; that is to say, of his own Life; and
consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own
Judgement, and Reason, hee shall conceive to be the
aptest means thereunto. (Leviathan, see Hobbes (1968))
Locke (1632–1704)
Men being . . . by nature all free, equal, and independent,
no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to
the political power of another without his consent. (The
Second Treatise of Government, see Locke (1952))
Kant (1724–1804)
So act that the maxim of your will can at the same time be
a universal law . . . Treat all humans as ends in themselves
rather than as mere means . . . Conduct yourself as a
member of a kingdom of ends. (Groundwork for the
Metaphysics of Morals, see Kant (2002))
(Edmundson, 2004)
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NORMATIVE AND THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS 15
Conservatives are most famously represented by
Edmund Burke (1729–1797), author of Re ections on
the Revolution in France (Burke, 1971); here, the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is
denounced in strong terms. Burke’s denunciation con-
cerned the basis on which people were thought to have
rights. He did not reject rights as such, but rejected
the idea that rights were natural, that they existed as
an ‘Archimedean point’ beyond government by which
government could be judged. Such abstractions were
wrong headed, he argued. Rather, man had rights
because of the organic traditions and institutions of his
society. Rights were the rights of Englishmen or French-
men, not of man. Di erent political communities may
construct di erent rights, he argued. e attempt to
impose one list of abstract rights on all men would
issue in the breakdown of social bonds, the eruption
of chaos, and eventually tyranny—expectations that
for Burke were vindicated by subsequent events in
France.
Liberals, in the form of utilitarians, also attacked
natural rights. Jeremy B entham (1748–1832) declared in
‘Anarchical Fallacies’ (Bentham, 1843): ‘Natural rights
is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptable rights,
rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.’ Natural
rights were ‘unreal metaphysical phenomena’, unreal
rights that stemmed from an unreal law, the natural law,
which itself was dismissed due to the absence of a divine
lawgiver. If one wanted to advance liberal democracy,
one should speak of the reform of actual rights and
laws—positive rights and laws—not fanciful ones.
Radicals criticized the rights of man for being the
rights of bourgeois man. Rights to liberty, property, and
personal security gave the entrepreneur a relatively free
hand in his capitalist occupations. e economic well-
being of the masses would remain of little concern.
Karl Marx’s (1818–1883) passion was the emancipation
of the proletariat or wage workers, to be achieved via
revolution wit h the backing of rigorous scie nce. In prac-
tice, rights were part of the general capitalist system of
domination that stood in the way of the achievement of
equality and well-being for all human persons.
e great irony of the rights revolution, then, is that,
just when the l anguage of natural rights became extraor-
dinarily e cacious in dealing with social and political
issues, the main currents of political and philosophical
thought became ambivalent about the idea (Langlois,
2001, Chapter 3).
KEY POINTS
The foundation for rights is a puzzling philosophical
question.
The early natural law foundation for rights became
vulnerable during the Enlightenment because of the
decline of Christian theism.
At the same time the idea of rights became more politically
effective.
Conservatives, liberals, and radicals all criticized the idea of
natural rights.
Modern Human Rights
would be held, was patently clear and known to any
reasonable person because it was a part of the natural
law. e point here—one to which we shall return—is
that positive law, be it domestic or international, is
held to account by a higher moral standard. Natural
law, then, was invoked as the legal basis for the indict-
ments against the Nazis and as the moral foundation
for liberal democracy and human rights.
Human rights standards were placed centrally in the
United Nations Charter (1945), and in 1948 the UN
promulgated its Universal Declaration. e UDHR
has a preamble and thirty articles, the rst of which
is was all changed by the Second World War (1939–
1945). e horror of total war and, in particular, the
atrocities of the Jewish Holocaust ‘outraged the con-
science of mankind’—to cite the language of the UN’s
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR; see
Box 1.3). In moral shock, the response of the collective
Wester n s ocial imagination was to return to the natural
law. Members of the Nazi leadership were charged and
tried at the Nuremberg Tribunal (1945–1949), under
the auspices of the natural law, with crimes against
humanity. is charge was not extant in any formal
international document or law, but was one that, so it
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16 A. J. LANGLOIS
declares that ‘all human beings are born free and equal
in dignity and rights.’ A quick perusal of the Declara-
tion is su cient for the reader to recognize all the main
elements of liberal political theory expressed in the
idioms of rst and second generation rights (see Box
1.4): the emphasis on freedom and liberty, dignity, and
equality; the importance of the rule of law, freedom
from slavery and torture, and the presumption of inno-
cence; the ownership of private property, freedom of
religion and expression, and the right to take part in the
government of one’s country ( rst generation rights);
and, more controversially, rights to adequate standards
of living, education, and cultural participation (second
generation rights).
is modern account of human rights contains philo-
sophical tensions. e whole underlying structure of the
human rights idea is linked to ideas of natural law and
natural right that, as we have seen, were philosophically
problematic. e content of the new human rights rep-
resented a very speci c philosophical account of human
society: that of liberal political thought. us, the new
universal human rights were highly particularistic: they
emerged out of Western philosophy and politics, and
they embodied a distinct ideological position. e sense
in which these ideas are universal has neither to do with
their history (which is one thread in the larger history of
the West) nor with any form of global empirical reality
(modern human rights are not found indigenously
occurring in all human societies). Instead, the universal-
ity of these rights derived from their proponents’ belief
that human sociability should be articulated (at least in
part) by the use of rights language, and that these partic-
ular rights should be the moral norms by which human
behaviour is judged and evaluated.
Box 1.4 Three Generations of Rights
The idea of generations of rights was coined by Karel Vasak
in the 1970s. Vasak adopted the rallying cry of the French
Revolution—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—as his template for
organizing our understandings of human rights. Vasak’s
template has become commonplace, despite being
unsatisfactory either as a theoretical or as a chronological
account of human rights.
Liberty rights are the fi rst generation rights. These
civil and political rights were the fi rst to be established
historically, and have often been viewed as the basis or
core of any possible rights system. These rights emerged to
protect the interests and negative liberties of the individual
against the power and encroachment of states, and include
freedom of speech, religion, and association, rights to a fair
trial, and voting rights, among others. They are codifi ed in
the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights.
The second generation rights, equality rights in Vasak’s
scheme, recognize that certain basic goods should be
equally available to all people; that a certain set of political
and economic circumstances are needed for human
fl ourishing. Included are rights to basic levels of economic
subsistence, education, work, housing, and health care,
among others. They are found in the UN’s International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
These rights are often called positive rights, as opposed
to the negative rights of the fi rst generation, because they
require rights providers to act, rather than to refrain from
interfering. This distinction is itself subject to much criticism
(see Shue, 1980).
Third generation rights, known as fraternity, solidarity,
or group rights, attends to communal aspects of human
being. These rights extend the reach of human rights to
matters such as the recognition of minority groups, social
identity, and cultural issues. These rights are often provided
for by dedicated UN human rights instrumentalities such as
the Declarations on the Right of Peoples to Peace, or the
Right to Development. This category of rights is the most
controversial and least institutionalized.
Box 1.3 From the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (1948)
Now, Therefore The General Assembly proclaims this
Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common
standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations,
to the end that every individual and every organ of
society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall
strive by teaching and education to promote respect for
these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures,
national and international, to secure their universal and
effective recognition and observance, both among the
peoples of Member States themselves and among the
peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.
Article 1: All human beings are born free and equal in
dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and
conscience and should act towards one another in a
spirit of brotherhood.
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NORMATIVE AND THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS 17
The Moral Basis of Human Rights
We see, then, that for proponents, human rights are
viewed as a set of moral demands, demands that should
be institutionalized in our corporate political life—
within states and internationally. How is it that these
moral demands are justi ed? e UDHR powerfully
articulates the moral urgency that energized the world
a er the Second World War. Crucially, however, the
UN document makes no attempt at explanation, justi-
cation, or philosophical defence. is was a deliberate
strategy (see Box 1.5). e Human Rights Commission,
the body given the responsibility to dra the UDHR,
was well aware of the di erences that would have to be
managed. Its strategy was to focus on norms or rules,
leaving aside questions of justi cation (Morsink, 2000).
Much has been written in the years since the Dec-
laration’s promulgation about how to reconcile the
speci city of the political and moral claims made in the
name of human rights with the multiplicity of human
ethical, religious, philosophical, cultural, and social
traditions. e dilemma is this: the UDHR engages a
universalist rhetoric to present a particular position,
that of the liberal rights tradition. is position is
normatively universal, to be sure; but it is not shared
universally by all human persons, and the traditions
and communities in which they live.
Much of the subsequent controversy associated with
arguments about universalism and relativism has been
complicated by the failure of rights proponents either
to be clear about or to properly understand the liberal
nature of the political project in which they are involved.
In the same way that believers in natural law and rights
o en claimed that these ideas were self-evident, so too,
for many believers in human rights, the liberal values
that they articulate are held to be universal, values of
the common human sense. But, in fact, they are not
common or universal, despite the desire of many of
us that they be so. And it is this that makes the philo-
sophical justi cation of human rights so important: the
proponents of human rights need to have good reasons
with which to defend human rights, and by which to
attempt to persuade others to support human rights.
One might argue that the di cult task of philosoph-
ical justi cation has been superseded by the creation
of the international human rights regime. It may be
observed that we have had sixty years of the develop-
ment and implementation of human rights law, both
domestically within states and internationally; that
human rights have ‘worldwide acceptance’ and ‘global
legitimacy’; that, by signing on to the UN Charter, the
UDHR, and subsequent human rights instruments,
states have ceded some measure of their sovereignty
and may legitimately and legally be held accountable for
their behaviour in relation to human rights standards.
It may be argued: given that the political philosophers
were unable to persuade the world of the veracity
of rights before the Second World War, perhaps the
defence of human rights is rightly given to the inter-
national lawyers and diplomats who have made such
progress in expanding the remit of human rights in the
decades since. We have human rights now, and they
are protected because of the laws and institutions these
people established and maintained.
e technical description of this approach is ‘the
argument from legal positivism’ (Langlois, 2004). e
main fault in the argument is that it risks equating or
reducing human rights to legal rights. e potential
danger in this approach is clear: it would mean that
human rights only exist where there are actual laws or
agreements or institutions that say they exist. Take these
away, and you no longer have human rights. Clearly this
Box 1.5 Jacques Maritain on the Justifi cation
of Rights
I am fully convinced that my way of justifying the belief
in the rights of man [sic] and the ideal of liberty, equality,
fraternity, is the only one which is solidly based on
truth. That does not prevent me from agreeing in these
practical tenets with those who are convinced that their
way of justifying them, entirely different from mine, or
even opposed to mine in its theoretical dynamism, is
likewise the only one that is based on truth. Assuming
they both believe in the democratic charter, a Christian
and a rationalist will nevertheless give justifi cations that
are incompatible with each other, to which their souls,
their minds and their blood are committed, and about
these justifi cations they will fi ght. And God keep me
from saying that it is not important to know which of the
two is right! That is essentially important. They remain,
however, in agreement on the practical affi rmation of
that charter, and they can formulate common principles
of action. (Maritain, J. (1947). The possibilities for co-
operation in a divided world. Inaugural address to
the Second International Conference of UNESCO, 6
November)
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18 A. J. LANGLOIS
is a perilous doctrine, one that runs against the thrust
of the human rights movement. e historical develop-
ment of human rights has depended on the conviction
that rights exist as moral demands that need to be trans-
lated into legal and institutional contexts in order to be
e ectively protected and policed. ese moral demands
stand behind any laws, agreements, or institutions, and
are the impetus for the creation of such. e ability to
claim or argue for rights is o en most important to us
when we do not in fact have a well-functioning legal
and institutional context by which to claim them—what
Jack Donnelly (1989) terms the ‘possession paradox’
(see Box 1.6). is ability is dependent upon people
being able to understand and identify with certain
moral requirements—one of the goals of philosophical
justi cation.
The Philosophical Justifi cation
of Modern Human Rights
We have se en that the idea of human rights emerged
out of the political history of the West and, in par-
ticular, out of liberal political theory. ere are many
varieties of liberalism, but they are all fundamentally
linked by their regard for the individual human subject.
In Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) phrase, individuals
are always to be regarded as an ends, not a means. All
individuals are to be considered of equal moral worth
and standing. But exactly how this is understood varies
between di erent proponents of liberalism. Here, I will
brie y indicate some alternative contemporary philo-
sophical approaches to the justi cation of rights within
liberalism.
Human dignity
e rights that people possess have o en been argued to
be grounded in the basic dignity of the human person.
Within the Western tradition, the principle historical
source for this idea of human dignity is the Christian idea
that man is made in the image of God—in the imago dei.
Liberal rights and freedoms are derived from the dignity
of man, which rests on the character of God—the ulti-
mate source of value. e human dignity approach to
rights justi cation has been signi cantly e ective in
making rights approaches understood in non-Western
political and religious traditions. (See Perry, 2000.)
Reason
More commonly, liberal approaches stress human char-
acteristics, rather than divine ones. So, for example,
the human capacity for rationally purposive agency
is determined to be the distinguishing characteris-
tic of human beings, and the prerequisite conditions
for ful lling this activity are considered to be entitle-
ments. us, humans have entitlements to well-being
and freedom as these are required for us to engage in
purposive activities; this in turn becomes the basis for a
fuller doctrine of human rights. (See Gewirth, 1996.)
Autonomy
e self-directed or self-authored life is considered to
be the human ideal. Autonomy and choice are funda-
mental ingredients in any valuable life, and rights are
derived from the conditions—the liberties and free-
doms—that are needed in order to sustain such a life.
(See Raz, 1986.)
Equality
e idea of political equality can mean the right to
equal treatment, or the right to treatment as an equal.
e former refers to goods and opportunities, and is
commonly granted in Western democracies in relation
to civil and political rights (such as the right to one vote
per person); it has had little acceptance in relation to
goods. ese treatments of equality rest fundamentally
on the notion of treatment as an equal—that each indi-
vidual has equal moral worth and should be accorded
this by equal respect in a political community’s political
processes. (See Dworkin, 1977.)
Box 1.6 The Possession Paradox
‘Having’ a right is . . . of most value precisely when one
does not ‘have’ the object of the right—that is, when
one is denied direct, objective enjoyment of the right. I
call this ‘the possession paradox’ of rights: ‘having’ and
‘not having’ a right at the same time, the ‘having’ being
particularly important precisely when one does not
‘have’ it. This possession paradox is characteristic of all
rights . . . We must distinguish between possession of a
right, the respect it receives and the ease or frequency
of enforcement . . . It is the ability to claim the right if
necessary—the special force this gives to the demand
and the special social practices it brings into play—that
make having rights so valuable and that distinguishes
having a right from simply enjoying the benefi t of being
the (right-less) benefi ciary of someone else’s obligation.
(Donnelly, 1989: 11–12)
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NORMATIVE AND THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS 19
Needs
All human beings have certain basic needs—the most
obvious ones being to do with security and subsistence.
e universality of these needs contributes to the case
for seeing them as basic rights. But the requirements for
ful lling these needs also links them theoretically to the
concept of rights, because the ful lment of these needs
is dependent on the availability of certain freedoms—
such as freedom of movement, freedom of association,
and freedom of information. Without e ective control
over these freedoms, people cannot be guaranteed their
basic needs. (See Shue, 1980.)
Capabilities
is neo-Aristotelian approach focuses on what people
are capable of being and doing: it is oriented toward
human p otential and ful lment. Capabilities themselves
are de ned as the general goods that are required to
live a life of dignity, and are seen by proponents as the
more fundamental normative basis upon which rights
regimes must rest. is approach is argued to provide a
more pluralistic justi cation for human rights, and has
o en been deployed as a corrective in arguments over
gender justice. (See Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2000.)
Consensus
is pragmatic approach is reluctant to be too speci c
about a particular grounding or foundation for human
rights, focusing instead on areas of agreement among
diverse people, and using this agreement as the basis for
legitimating rights. is approach has the advantage of
being pluralistic, but the disadvantage of only function-
ing well where there is already substantial agreement,
either philosophically or institutionally, and generally
trades on a background liberal culture. (See Rawls,
1971, 1993, 1999.)
KEY POINTS
The Second World War was the catalyst for the modern
re-deployment of the idea of the rights of man, now called
Human Rights.
The United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights
was promulgated in 1948.
While the rights in the new Declaration emerge out of
the liberal political tradition, no philosophical justifi cation
is formally given for the rights declared because of the
variability of human belief systems. Individuals and groups
are left to expound their own justifi cations for the rights in
the Declaration.
Liberal justifi cations for human rights have been presented
on the following grounds: human dignity, our ability to
reason, the autonomy of individuals, the equality of all
persons, our common needs, the capabilities of the human
person, and the consensus of diverse parties on key beliefs.
The Universalism of Human Rights
norms of human rights emergent out of the West only
apply in the West. Related to this is the argument from
imperialism, which—o en using cultural relativism
as a supporting argument—states that, far from being
about the protection of all people everywhere, human
rights is a political tool that has been used to promote
and defend Western interests. e argument from
imperialism suggests that the ‘truths’ of human rights
are disguised forms of power, part of a complex system
of global political manipulation.
Cultural Relativism
e cultural relativist o en criticizes the human rights
doctrine for not being respectful of di erent cultural,
religious, and philosophical traditions, and therefore,
A key di culty is the UDHR’s claim to have univer-
sal application. Some people simply reject the idea
of human rights, or the idea that such rights might
be universal. Others advance modi ed approaches to
human rights.
Rejecting Human Rights
e challenge against the universalism of human rights
comes in a number of di erent forms. e most extreme
is the rejection of human rights altogether. Commonly,
this rejection of human rights is put in one of two related
ways (Freeman, 2002, Chapter 6). e rst is the argu-
ment from cultural relativism, a conceptual rejection of
rights that states that norms are only appropriate for the
cultures out of which they emerge, and that therefore the
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20 A. J. LANGLOIS
ultimately, of not respecting peoples’ identities. Tol e r-
ance and respect are the key values here; the irony is
supposed to be that liberals, in the form of human
rights proponents, are being illiberal by expecting
everyone else to become liberals. However, this is an
inconsistent use of the cultural relativist argument,
precisely because it is not relative enough.
A consistent relativist is refuted by her own doctrine:
by claiming that all truths are relative, she proclaims
the relativism of her own truths, and the incoherence
of her position. A consistent relativist cannot priori-
tize any values at all. A relativist has no basis on which
to hold that tolerance or respect are universal values
that can be used to discredit the supposed interfer-
ence of speci c liberal values (note the double irony
that tolerance and respect, along with an appreciation
of pluralism, are liberal values anyway: the so-called
relativist may simply be a confused liberal). All that a
consistent cultural relativist can do in politics is to note
that people have di erent values: the relativist has no
basis for ordering or prioritizing these values, and is
thus reduced to political quietism and irrelevance.
A quite common source of this inconsistency is a
failure to di erentiate between the theoretical claims
of cultural relativism and the empirical fact of cultural
relativity. e former undermines any attempt to estab-
lish a basis for universal human rights; the latter simply
recognizes that people (as individuals and groups) are
di erent from one another. What one does with this
recognition will depend entirely on one’s broader philo-
sophical approach.
Human Rights Imperialism
A similar confusion is played out by those who charge
human rights universalists with being imperialistic.
Ironically, the anti-imperialism of the human rights
challengers must also appeal to a universal principle—a
universal principle of anti-imperialism. is principle
must either be a principle of freedom, a principle of
tolerance, or a principle of equality. It would suggest
that people should be free to believe what they like or
belong to whichever culture they like; or, people should
tolerate the di erences of others and respect their right
to be di erent; or, people should regard other people’s
capacity to belong to a culture and to have beliefs as
equal to their own such capacity. In any of these cases,
the argument of the cultural imperialists seems to
reduce into an argument along these lines: ‘we do not
agree with you imposing your will on us, because we do
agree with you that we have certain rights to liberty of
action and belief.’ e anti-imperialist’s argument, like
that of the confused relativist’s, seems to be a form of
nascent liberalism.
ere is a crucial question that must be addressed to
political leaders who engage in the human rights chal-
lenging rhetoric of anti-imperialism: Are the cultural
beliefs and practices that they defend using the rhetoric
of anti-imperialism consistent with the principles that
are logically required to frame that anti-imperialism? In
all too many of the political disputes over human rights
in international politics, those taking the anti-imperial-
ist line against human rights fail to apply the principles
that support their anti-imperialism within the juris-
dictions over which they have authority. Strongman
authoritarian leaders argue against human rights on
the basis of universal principles that give state leaders
freedom, autonomy, and equal respect in the commu-
nity of sovereign states, and then impose policies that
deprive their citizens of that same freedom, tolerance,
and equality within the domestic polity. Or, similarly,
religious leaders demand freedom of belief, tolerance,
and equal treatment for their religious values and prac-
tices, and then proceed to deny freedom, tolerance, and
equal treatment to members of their communities who
may have minority or dissenting opinions. e anti-
imperialist rhetoric is useful for drawing our attention
to the universal principles we use to frame our responses
to injustice; however, rather than succeeding as a cri-
tique of the liberalism that grounds human rights, this
rhetoric’s failures and inconsistencies serve to further
support liberalism’s claim to be a more adequate safe-
guard against imperialism.
Modifying Human Rights
Some challengers value human rights but question the
justi cations used by contemporary liberal theorists.
e criticism is that the reasoning from which the uni-
versality derives is a very particular way of thinking
about what it is to be human, which might not legiti-
mately apply to all human persons. e approach is
criticized for being foundationalist and essentialist.
It proposes a certain foundation for moral thinking, a
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NORMATIVE AND THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS 21
foundation that is characterized as universal; the criti-
cism is, however, that this foundation only stands if
one agrees with the philosophical premises on which
it is based, and that there is in turn no knock-down
argument to guarantee the veracity of those premises.
Similarly, it is essentialist, in that it claims that certain
qualities or capacities (reason, autonomy, for example)
are essential to what it means to be human, or to how
we determine the nature of morality and ethics; in
turn, there is no nal agreement on what qualities or
capacities are central to our ‘humanness’. erefore, to
proclaim a set of universal rights on the basis of such
particular assumptions is to claim too much; it also
excludes from consideration a range of other ways of
thinking and feeling about the human condition and
how we should respond to it.
The Feminist Challenge
is form of criticism of the universality of human
rights has o en been taken up by feminist thinkers.
eir argument has o en been that ‘the rights of man’
were precisely that: rights a orded to men. ey argue
that historically women were thought of quite di er-
ently from the way in which men were conceptualized.
For example, the ‘right reason’, autonomy, and equal-
ity that were used to characterize the essential qualities
of what it meant to be human within the liberal tradi-
tion were not considered to be characteristics properly
assumed by women. Women were not understood to be
rational or autonomous, and while they may have been
considered to have equal moral worth with men, they
certainly did not have equal status or place in society.
e feminist movement has been successful in bringing
many of these issues to attention and in changing both
social views and institutions. By the time of the creation
of the UN, feminists had gained su cient in uence to
have the rights of women included in the UN Charter,
a move that was central to the increased institutional
recognition of women’s rights at the international
level. Key milestones here were the Decade for Women
(1975–1985) and the adoption in 1979 of the Conven-
tion on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination
Against Wo m e n (CEDAW).
But there is still a long way to go. eoretical issues
continue to play an important role in the debates about
women’s rights (see Okin, 1999; Nussbaum, 2000; Gould,
2004). A key example here is the debate over the way
in which we divide the social world into a private
sphere and a public sphere. Traditionally, liberals have
argued that this division, which is designed to protect
citizens’ private lives from the power of the state, plays
a crucial role in protecting women from rights viola-
tions. However, many feminists will argue in turn that
it is precisely in the private sphere that women are most
vulnerable to rights abuse by powerful men, so that
sanctioning the distinction is tantamount to ignoring
the most egregious and systematic denial of women’s
rights. It is in the private sphere that sexual violence,
reproductive rights, child rearing, and many other
issues are faced by women each day. e concern is that
many of these problems are not adequately addressed by
the received understanding of rights. On the one hand,
the theoretical structures used to explain and justify
rights values appear to be signi cantly disconnected
from both the concerns and experiences of women; on
the other hand, the institutions that have emerged out
of the received rights politics fail to adequately address
the way in which women su er rights abuses, primar-
ily because their default setting is to address the rights
abuses experienced by men. For some feminists, this is
the basis for a reform agenda. For others, the de cien-
cies of the present framework are so serious that they
de-legitimize the framework altogether, requiring a
more radical solution.
Religious Challenges
e evolution of modern rights in the West went hand
in hand with increased challenges to Christian religious
orthodoxy; but the values that were to be articulated as
rights were nonetheless deeply shaped by those same
patterns of religious belief. At the global level, however,
there are many di erent forms of religion. ese in
turn are structured around many di erent values
systems, which may or may not be compatible with
modern human rights—both in form and substance.
For example, the autonomy and equality that is so priv-
ileged by Western liberalism has o en been directly
challenged by religious leaders from other traditions.
is is a challenge both to the underlying philosoph-
ical framework of human rights, and to speci c rights
as articulated in the UDHR and other human rights
documents.
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22 A. J. LANGLOIS
e responses to global religious diversity by human
rights theorists and proponents are many and varied.
Some take the view that, because human rights are to
be universal, the introduction of speci c or particu-
laristic values drawn from religions will undermine
the universalism of rights. For others the only way
for human rights to be universal is to translate them
through the particularistic traditions of human beings.
So, for Muslims or Hindus (as two examples) to be able
to embrace human rights, they must be able to give jus-
ti cations for the values expressed by the human rights
movement; but these justi cations must also be genu-
inely integral to their own tradition as well.
Some religious communities reject human rights
completely, seeing them as alien and incompatible with
their way of being. Others have moved from rejection
to embrace—the Roman Catholic Church being the
key example here. Many religious communities view
human rights as consonant with their own traditions.
Still others have been persuaded that there is a need to
reinterpret their own tradition in the light of human
rights, seeing this as an opportunity for the revital-
ization and rejuvenation of belief structures at risk of
ossi cation.
Group Rights
e idea of group rights poses a fascinating challenge to
rights universalism, a challenge that emerges out of the
success of human rights (Kymlicka, 2007). Proponents
of group rights argue that for certain groups of people
it may be legitimate to invoke speci c rights, or speci c
interpretations of rights, which do not apply universally.
Access to these rights is dependent on membership of
a group. ese groups may be of a religious, social, cul-
tural, indigenous, gender, sexual orientation, or other
minority issue nature.
Universalists have signi cant concerns about group
rights (Jones, 1999). One concern rests on whether
such rights are understood as the rights of individuals
that arise from membership of a group, or whether they
are understood as rights that accrue to the group itself
(however the identity or nature of this group might be
understood, itself a vexed question). If group rights are
the rights that accrue to the group, liberals have con-
cerns about how individuals within such groups will be
treated. Will they, for example, have a right to speak, or
crucially, to exit, if they disagree with the behaviour of
the group? And how would such an exit right be adju-
dicated against the group’s right to ensure its survival
and growth?
e rights of minorities and groups are without doubt
signi cant political issues. Many of these rights have been
realized or bolstered because of the in uence of the now
global human rights regime. ere is a grave concern,
however, that the values of some groups may undermine
those of the universal human rights regime. e liberal
account of rights that informs the human rights regime
is premised fundamentally on the well-being of individ-
uals. Group rights are of use to human rights when they
bolster those groups of individuals whose human rights
are inadequately supported by universal regimes. But
what this suggests strongly is that group rights should
always be derivative from human rights—understood,
as they are in the UDHR, as the rights of individuals.
is sets up a permanent tension between the propon-
ents of human rights and others who do not place so
much value on the liberal individualism that structures
the human rights movement. Awareness of this tension
in turn helps us to see the quintessentially political nature
of the human rights project (Jones, 2008).
KEY POINTS
Cultural relativists criticize human rights for illegitimately
privileging one set of values over others; rights defenders
respond that it is the relativists whose views are
inconsistent and that there are very good reasons for
privileging rights values.
Human rights are criticized for being the exercise of
an imperialist politics; however, those who make this
argument are shown to be inconsistent and not genuinely
concerned with protecting the victims of authoritarian rule.
Feminists argue that the international human rights regime
is inadequate to satisfy woman’s rights. Some argue for
reform, others for more radical solutions.
Some religious groups reject the liberal rights tradition;
others adopt it wholeheartedly. Some religious groups
reinterpret human rights through their own traditions;
others explicitly use human rights to reform their own
tradition.
Group rights are invoked as a way of protecting the rights
of minorities who belong to identifi able groups. These
rights are politically very controversial, not least because
in some forms they can undermine the protections of the
more general human rights regime.
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NORMATIVE AND THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS 23
Human Rights as a Political Project
a political outcome, a compromise, or a diplomatic
resolution of competing interests. Rights declarations,
then, must also be recognized as political instruments.
e implementation of a rights regime is the third
level at which rights are political. e decision to
describe certain states of being as human rights abuses,
the decision to use state power to change circumstances
or to detain or free individuals in the name of human
rights—these are all profoundly political decisions, and
they are decisions that of necessity are engaged with in
a local context. e diversity of human communities
may well mean that behaviour that in one place is con-
sidered a rights abuse is routinely accepted somewhere
else. ere is no settled means for universal resolution
of these di erences.
e fourth level at which human rights are political
is the most familiar: rights emerged within the Western
tradition as a way of preserving the freedoms and liber-
ties of individuals and groups against the powers of the
state. e political project of human rights is a strat-
egy for ghting against existing power structures in
the hope of creating a social environment that is more
nearly just. Local context is everything in this equation,
and where that local context is inhospitable to the prin-
ciples embedded in received human rights norms, the
struggle can be interminable and disheartening.
What is common across these four areas is the way
in which the normative agenda pursued by human
rights practitioners is both displayed and questioned,
challenged and interrogated (Langlois, 2001; Baxi,
2006). Whether one is explaining a normative tradi-
tion, declaring a right, applying some aspect of a rights
regime, or defending the rights of the abused against
powerful interests, one is asserting a set of political
beliefs about the value of human beings and the way in
which they should be treated. Defending those convic-
tions is an essential part of the human rights project
and is ultimately what we are doing when we engage in
debates about the normative and theoretical justi ca-
tion of human rights.
e rhetoric of human rights can sometimes obscure
the many ways in which the human rights movement
is a political movement. e talk of universalism, of
common standards for human kind, and of inalienable
and self-evident rights, can give the impression that all
the big questions about human rights are settled. As
even a cursory investigation of the history of the human
rights idea shows, however, the greater part of what we
appeal to when we appeal to human rights is contro-
versial and contested. ere are four levels at which the
political nature of human rights is important.
e rst level has to do with the normative tradition
out of which human rights historically emerges. e
normative under-girdings of human rights are from
liberal political theory and, before that, from the natural
law tradition. In our contemporary world, the language
of human rights is being spoken by people who work in
a great variety of other traditions, and the con uence
of these traditions with that of the liberal one produces
contestation, dispute, and disagreement. e claim that
the liberal approach should continue to be the arbiter or
referee in the continued development of human rights
as they go global is deeply controversial. Similarly, any
change to the existing human rights corpus brought on
by adopting values from other traditions is also deeply
controversial. ere are no xed answers about how to
resolve these con icts.
A second level at which human rights are polit-
ical concerns rights declarations—quintessentially the
UDHR, but also its precursors, and the subsequent
human rights instruments created through the UN
and regionally. Human rights declarations are usually
the product of a committee appointed by a political
authority. What goes into a declaration and what is
le out is determined by those involved in the dra -
ing. None of these people have clear and pristine access
to human reason or religious revelation; the rights that
they declare are heavily contingent on the historical and
political framework in which they work. However good
or bad a particular rights declaration may be, it is always
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24 A. J. LANGLOIS
QUESTIONS
INDIVIDUAL STUDY QUESTIONS
1. Why is the history of the human rights idea important today?
2. Why do the rights of international human rights law need philosophical or moral foundations?
3. What are the strengths and limitations of Jacques Maritain’s position on the justifi cation of rights?
4. Explain why having a right is most important when we lack the object of that right?
5. What are the common elements of the various liberal justifi cations for rights?
6. What appear to be the key differences between the three generations of rights?
GROUP DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Examine the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and explore how its key words and phrases
embody the ideals of political liberalism.
2. Why are the cultural relativists and imperialists wrong to dismiss human rights?
3. Discuss the different approaches of feminists to human rights.
4. In what ways do religious traditions relate to human rights?
5. Why and in what senses are human rights political?
KEY POINTS
Human rights are political in the following four senses. The implementation of any established human rights regime
is subject to interpretation, political context, and local
circumstances.
Human rights are political because they embody a set of
norms that emerged out of the tradition of political liberalism,
with which not all identify.
The pursuit of human rights translates into local engagement,
and quite often bitter confrontation, with prevailing unjust
power structures.
Specifi c human rights regimes are created by groups
of people who have their own political agendas and
constituencies, and who must make decisions about what to
include and exclude that cannot satisfy everyone.
Conclusion
ese in turn are present in many of the debates in con-
temporary global politics over the meaning, usefulness,
and e ective implementation of human rights. is
chapter has shown that understanding the history and
philosophy of human rights is essential to being able
to navigate the complex political debates surrounding
the desirability and normative content of human rights
reform in the international system.
e language of human rights is fundamentally a nor-
mative or ethical language, one that emerges out of the
political liberalism of the Enlightenment, and one that
leads to a very distinctive form of political engagement.
In our modern period, the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights is the de ning text of the human rights
movement; but behind the rights that are declared in
that document are layers of history and philosophy.
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NORMATIVE AND THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS 25
FURTHER READING
Baxi, U. (2006). The Future of Human Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The author connects the sometimes complacent arguments about human rights theory with the lives of those
suffering human rights abuse and considers the new challenges facing human rights today.
Freeman, M. (2002). Human Rights: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Cambridge: Polity.
A useful introductory text, covering the history of human rights, key theoretical issues, and contemporary
challenges such as globalization.
Griffi n, J. (2008). On Human Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
A state-of-the-art attempt to provide a substantive theory of human rights.
Herbert, G. B. (2002). A Philosophical History of Rights. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
A comprehensive philosophical survey of the history of the idea of rights.
Ignatieff, M. (2001). Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
In two highly accessible essays Ignatieff sets out all the major issues to do with human rights in contemporary
international politics; his views are then interrogated by a number of eminent commentators.
Langlois, A. J. (2001). The Politics of Justice and Human Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This book considers the questions of universalism and pluralism through an examination of the so-called
Asian Values Debate of the 1990s.
Lauren, P. G. (1998). The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen. Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
A comprehensive historical account of the rise of human rights.
Mahoney, J. (2007). The Challenge of Human Rights. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Traces the rise of human rights as a resource for ethical reasoning in politics.
WEB LINKS
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights-human/ The human rights entry in the online Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, which provides valuable discussion and useful links to related topics.
http://europa.eu/pol/rights/index_en.htm The European Union Human Rights website provides a discussion
of the role of human rights in the EU, including legislation and other activities.
http://www.rightsphilosophyforum.org/index.html The Rights Philosophy Forum provides biographies,
learning guides, and other resources for those interested in studying human rights.
http://www.natsiew.nexus.edu.au/lens/udhr/index.html An annotated Universal Declaration of Human Rights
provided by the Australian National Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Education website. It provides links
under each article of the UDHR to the websites of organizations concerned with the rights expressed in that
article.
ONLINE RESOURCE CENTRE
Visit the Online Resource Centre that accompanies this book for updates and a range of other
resources:
http://www.oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/orc/goodhart/
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