Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

Abstract

The primary if not sole concern of Samuel Moyn in his recent and critically fêted book Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World is with distributive or material equality. If it were not already clear from the preceding chapters of the book, the concluding chapter, which draws on the allegorical tale of Croesus, makes this quite evident. The first normative argument Moyn wants to make is that even if the economic and social needs and the political and civil liberties of all individuals were adequately met, and all parts of the world’s population lived in dignity and freedom with material sufficiency, the existence of a gulf in terms of wealth between the richest and the rest would be unacceptable and immoral. The second and more empirical argument of the book is that the human rights system has failed to address this gulf and instead has obligingly accompanied the growing gap between the rich and the rest.