Justifying Human Rights: The Roles of Domain, Audience, and Constituency

Philosophical theories of human rights are often concerned with justification. They take rights declared to exist by international law and propose general reasons why they should be recognized by states or by anyone. The reasons proposed may not be reasons for recognizing every single one of the supposed rights mentioned in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but philosophical theories often justify the articles of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and many of the articles of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). These theories find a single kind of general reason for recognizing many of these different rights, usually stating that general reason in a vocabulary that coheres with the language of the major treaties or with the General Comments of the associated UN treaty bodies. Thus one mainstream justification of human rights obligations is that human dignity or humanity requires the things that the rights are rights to (Donnelly 1985; Nickell 1987) and that humanity or human dignity are undercut or shown contempt when those requirements are ignored or fail to be met. The dignity or humanity of a person is said to be denied, for example, if he or she is imprisoned for no reason, has his or her house seized at the whim of those in power, or is refused access to schooling because of his or her race. To whom are philosophical theories addressed, and what use can be made in practice of the sort of justification that they provide? Are they meant to make explicit the reasons that individuals might give to the authorities for protesting at arbitrary arrest or for having their children turned away at a school gate on account of their skin color? Philosophical theories may imply such reasons, but they are mainly intended to unify and systematize the different goods that human rights are meant to secure, while also basing human rights on some value that can be widely agreed to. Like all unifying schemes philosophical theories are more abstract than what they unify. Being abstract, they are very far from being briefing notes for protesters against particular rights violations or even briefing notes for human rights–respecting governments who are arguing against rogue states in bilateral or multilateral diplomacy. It is probably closer to the truth to say that philosophical